


The Passenger

by hansbekhart



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Apocalypse, Body Horror, Canonical Character Death, Child Death, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Psychological Trauma, Recreational Drug Use, Season/Series 03, Temporary Character Death, Violence, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-07-14
Updated: 2009-07-14
Packaged: 2018-07-14 03:42:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 33,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7151657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hansbekhart/pseuds/hansbekhart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Victor Henriksen survives Lilith’s attack only to be a plunged into a world beyond his experience and understanding, full of demons, angels and trickster gods. War is coming. He turns to the Winchesters for help, but Dean’s year is running out and Sam is desperate to find a way to save his brother. An outsider in their war, Victor finds himself caught up between good, evil and sheer chaos. He and the Winchester’s newfound allies must scramble to save a world that has already been destroyed by Armageddon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to [livejournal](http://hansbekhart.livejournal.com/330449.html), for the 2009 SPN Big Bang.

  


The room is white, all white, and the first thing he sees when he opens his eyes is Dean Winchester. “You’re dead,” he manages.

Dean shrugs, smiles. “That’s what your boss thinks. Thanks for that.”

Victor shakes his head. Doesn’t even know what Dean is talking about, what his boss has to do with anything, what his boss has to do with the bloody rotten heart that the little girl smeared over his face. She said it was Dean’s, that he could have it now. Victor squeezes his eyes shut. He wants to tell Dean what happened, about Lilith and the white light and how it all went on for hours and hours. His mouth is dry and his jaw might be taped shut. Can’t even think to feel all the shit that must be wrong with him. His eyes travel up to the IV, all those little lights on the wall. There’s someone standing behind Dean, leaning against the wall with his hands in the pockets of his coat.

“What,” he says. “You. Why.”

Dean Winchester is holding his hand. “Use your words like a big boy,” he says, but his face is pale and scared. “You’re okay now. They got you out.”

Then Victor really is crying, his whole body shaking and jerking. He thinks he might be screaming. It goes on for a long time and when he’s quiet again he’s still shaking and Dean is still gripping his hand. It hurts where Lilith pulled out his fingernails and he can barely feel anything through the bandages and painkillers, but he hangs on.

“Nancy,” he gasps. “Reidy. The others.”

Dean doesn’t say anything, which is all the answer Victor needs. “Lilith,” Dean says, after a while. Soft like she can hear him calling. “She blew the place sky high. The paramedics pulled you out of the fire. Nancy too, but there wasn’t … she died on the way to the hospital.” He shakes his head. Victor can hear the collar of his leather jacket creak. “Maybe we were wrong. Ruby thinks so, anyway. Sam too. Not that he’s said anything, but – y’know. Tango to my Cash or whatever.

If he could, Victor would tell him that it was worth it. That he’d rather have died, because a righteous death is all he’s ever asked for, and it beats sacrificing something good and pure any day of the week. But his throat is raw from fire and screaming and the best he can do is a soft, hurt noise. Dean glances up at him, meets Victor’s eyes. Man looks fucking exhausted. Looks human.

“I’m so fucking sorry,” Dean says. Victor grips Dean’s fingers as best he can. The guy in the corner hasn’t moved the whole time, staring at Victor with wide, sorrowful eyes. Hard for Victor to see him, like he’s not really there. Only thing that’s really clear is that he’s not Sam.

“You can’t be here,” Victor rasps. Jaw’s not taped shut, just hurts to move it, hurts to move anything. “They’ll catch you.”

Dean shrugs. “I’ll be fine. You just worry ‘bout yourself.” He tries for a smile, but it slips quickly off his face.

Victor shifts his head on the pillow. It’s all he can do now. Whole body feels so heavy. Being dragged back down to sleep. Dean’s thumb is stroking over the back of his hand like it’s not covered in bandages. It helps.

-

 

The first thing that Victor does, when he can do anything more than piss into a bag or blink, is ask for the charm that came in with him. He feels better just having the thing around his neck, and some part of him - the part that didn't believe in demons or possession or the boogieman - thinks that maybe that's the point, that he's buying into the placebo. He still doesn’t take it off.

The doctors come and explain what’s wrong with him. He listens, nods. They have a lot of recommendations. Surgery. Bed rest. Retirement. Physical therapy. The other kind of therapy. Afterwards, there are visits from higher ups. They tell him that no matter what he wants to do, he'll be looked after. It's kinder than he was expecting, but he did manage to take out the Winchester brothers, the most notorious serial killers that the new millennium's managed to cough up. He's gotta tell Dean - assuming he ever sees Dean again - that towards the end of the hunt, Dean and Sam got bumped up the Most Wanted list, second only to Osama bin Laden. He thinks Dean would appreciate the humor in that.

They bring him his laptop. There're a couple emails from Reidy that he doesn't open, just leaves them be. He never even saw Reidy’s body. Too busy getting the world turned upside down. They do a special on the Winchesters on America's Most Wanted. He finds it uploaded on YouTube, watches it late at night with the volume turned almost all the way down. Walsh goes over the whole story, from the Winchesters' sordid beginnings to their sordid deaths. There's even a section about Victor. The hero FBI agent who foiled yet another escape attempt, barely escaping with his own life. The writers must've made a special effort, but the story of that night doesn't make too much sense. Doesn't matter. America's proud of you, son, and all that crap. The cards and flowers pile up on the table and he ignores them.

He can't get warm. Not even where he's burned all up and down his leg, where the skin feels hot when he holds his hand over it. His whole body shakes and shivers so hard that he can barely talk. Not that he talks much anyway. There's nobody to talk to. Reidy's gone. He used to talk to Dean Winchester sometimes, got so deep in the man's head that he'd carry on full conversations, but it feels a little weird to do it now that he knows Winchester isn't a raving monster. So he curls over onto his side and doesn't talk to the doctors, doesn't talk to the suits. There's no way to explain what happened and Victor knows better than anybody that in the absence of facts, they'll make up whatever they want. So he sleeps. When they let him, he drags his IV and his fucked up leg up and down the hallway outside his room. Walks back and forth. The doctor catches him at it, asks him where he's going in such a hurry – if he's planning on jumping back into the good fight. There’s not a whole lot to say to that, so he doesn’t say anything.

Twice, he wakes up in the middle of the night knowing that someone is in the room with him. He never sees their face; only knows that it’s not Dean or Sam or whoever Dean brought with him, that first day after. Somebody else. Shorter and stockier, staring out the window like he’s not even there to see Victor. Gone as soon as Victor’s awake enough to really see him.

He should be scared. He’ll probably be terrified later. He remembers when he was a kid, realizing abruptly that he should be scared of strangers. It had been two years by then, two years of taking rides from grown ups he didn’t know, of a hundred stupid decisions that could have ended his family for good. He lifts the charm off his neck high enough to be able to see it, to watch it catch the light.

He’d come home and dropped to his knees where his mother sat on the couch. Couldn’t have been more than eight at the time. Pressed his face into the worn crease of her pants and couldn’t even get anything out, any of the apologies he wanted to say. The bridges he’d walked under and the nights he’d slipped out of his bedroom window to go play down by the river. She hadn’t even noticed he was there.

-

 

Eight days later, he finally goes through his mailbox. There are ten emails from Reidy, only two of which are for him. He’s just cc’ed on the rest, business emails that don’t even fucking matter anymore. There was a funeral for Reidy. A service held for everyone who gave their lives to bring down the Winchesters. Victor hadn’t even regained consciousness by then.

He clears out his junk mail rather than read through any of the real messages. Over six hundred invitations to invest in Nigeria and get a bigger dick, and he’s scanning down the list when one catches his eye.

_SAMANTHA IS ACHING FOR YOUR BIG BLACK COCK._

He clicks.

The email is from letthereberock@hotmail.com, which is less subtle than usual. Making sure the message was received, he guesses.

_HELL AIN’T A BAD PLACE TO BE. FOR A GOOD TIME CALL YOU’RE MOM._

878-978-8899 24/7/365

 

And that’s it. It’s more than he was expecting and his hands shake as he deletes the message. Doesn’t want any more risk on their heads than necessary. He won’t forget the number, anyway.

Two weeks later, he’s sent home. Two agents come to take him to the airport, scrubbed and creased and embarrassingly earnest. He doesn’t know what they’re expecting out of him. He says thanks when one helps him into the wheelchair, when he understands that all the paperwork’s been taken care of, that all he has to do is leave. He doesn’t have enough pride left not to be stupidly grateful for that, to not have to think or speak or do anything but get home.

They ride with him all the way. First class tickets, one sitting next to him and the other across the aisle. On high alert, which they probably are. The Winchesters had friends, a whole network of backwater freaks. For all the Bureau knows, they’re all out for his blood. For all Victor knows, it’s true.

He and Reidy didn’t get to fly much over the last few years, because the Winchesters never flew. If he ever heard from Dean again, he should ask about that. Gotta be hell on a car, driving cross-country like that, and that Chevy they impounded must get what, ten, twelve miles to the gallon? He remembers talking it over with Reidy, trying to figure it out. Deciding that total lack of fuel efficiency was another symptom of a diseased mind.

He closes his eyes and goes to sleep. Been a long time since he’s been on a plane. He doesn’t wake up until the plane touches down in Dulles. He makes them leave the wheelchair at the gate. He knows what’s waiting for him past security.

Josiah’s eyes never leave Victor’s as he makes his way slowly down the walk. He can’t bend his knee – can’t lift his leg. He slides one foot, lifts the other, making a grim, slow path.

“Sir,” the man on his left says quietly. “Is there anything we can do to help?” They introduced themselves at the hospital and Victor forgot their names immediately. They’re braced on either side of him. He can feel them at the ready, tensed to catch him when he falls.

“No,” Victor says. He lifts his chin and straightens his spine and counts the back and forth of shuffle and step until he can meet his father the way he wants to, the way he always does. It’s the first time he’s felt like the man the news says he is, like he’s done anything to be proud of.

“I’ll take him from here,” Josiah says, when they reach him. The agents shake his hand one by one, and then turn to shake Victor’s. It’s awkward because his left hand is the good one, and the agent cracks a stiff smile when he offers his right instinctively.

“Been an honor, sir,” the other one says and Victor flinches.

It’s a short walk to the van, which Josiah left right outside with the hazards on. “Did you,” Josiah says, motioning towards the van and the wheelchair ramp inside.

“No,” Victor says, “I don’t think my house is exactly ADA compliant. I’ve got some crutches from a few years ago, I’ll manage.”

It’s almost evening and the traffic is non-existent. Victor stares out the window, tries to figure out what day it is, what month. The highways should be clogged with commuters. Maybe it’s the weekend. He can’t even remember when the last time he went home. Josiah drives in silence, his back straight and chin up. Victor studies his hands. His fingernails have started to grow back, little tender half-moons that don’t cover nearly enough of the sensitive bare skin that should be underneath them. Reidy used to bite his fingernails, Victor thinks, and squeezes his eyes shut.

When he opens them, he’s home. The car is parked and Josiah is watching him in a way that makes Victor think they’ve been parked for more than a few minutes. “Let’s get you settled,” is all he says. He takes Victor’s keys from him and goes to open the front door. Victor stares at the door handle, counts the steps around the car, up over the sidewalk, up the broad stairs. He did the walk up and down the halls in the hospital. Managed three flights of stairs once before they caught him at it, made him go back to his room. He can do this.

The door opens while he’s still staring at the handle, trying to talk himself into reaching out for it, and Josiah’s there, Victor’s crutches propped against the side of the car. Kneecapped three years ago by some scumbag, chased the guy down with a bullet in his leg and not a clue about the blood soaking into his pants, and fuck if he never heard the end of that one.

Between them, they manage to get Victor out of the car. Josiah hangs back and lets him get up the stairs by himself. The house is cold, unlived in. He hasn’t even been here since – early autumn, maybe. August, September. Maybe a day or two in-between, make sure his TV is still there, make sure his life still exists. Long enough that the last time he was home, he brought Reidy with him and they had a couple beers together, watched the game. He hasn’t had a drink in months. It was paranoia, the thought of the Winchesters turning the hunt around. Of letting their guards down long enough to have those couple drinks in the hotel bar, of sleeping hard enough that they wouldn’t wake up until the knife was at someone’s throat. They knew what Winchester did to his victims.

Victor sits heavily on the couch. “Still taking your work home with you,” Josiah says.

“Yes sir,” Victor answers. The room is cluttered with boxes stacked on top of each other, full of paperwork and police reports and photographs. Evidence that shouldn’t have been in his possession. The last five years of his life. Abruptly, it’s too hard to even lift his head off the couch. His body aches all over. All he wants to do is just set all that weight down, just for a little while.

“Got a long drive back,” Josiah offers. Victor nods, and Josiah hesitates. “Your mother,” he says, “she saw you on the news. Been glued to the TV ever since, they tell me.”

“I meant to bring her some flowers, last time I was in the city,” Victor says, and Josiah shakes his head.

“You just take care of yourself,” he says. “We’ll see you when you’re better.”

The house is dead quiet after he’s gone. Victor puts on the television, makes a pot of coffee. He can make it from room to room by letting the walls hold his weight, bracing on the hard surfaces. When he limps back into the living room his own face is on the TV screen, and it startles him so badly that he drops the coffee. It soaks into the rug and his pants. Probably saved himself from a scalding, all the bandages wrapped around his legs. He stares at the stain spreading dark and ugly across his carpet and goes to get his jacket.

The liquor store is two blocks away. Level ground, at least. He buys the best bourbon they sell. It’s awkward, bracing the bag with his crutches. The bottle clinks against the metal with every slow step. It’s full dark by the time he gets home, and he pulls the door shut feeling like someone’s watching him do it.

He has to talk himself into every sip. The first burns his stomach. He’s on more painkillers than he wants to count but the bottle has never seemed like a better choice. He gets the phone at the bottom of his first glass, makes the call at the bottom of his second.

Reidy’s mom lives way the hell down in North Carolina and never leaves her house. He’s met her twice. Equally embarrassing both times, Reidy taking him home to see the family, pie laid out on the windowsill like a fucking movie set. She doesn’t answer the phone. She’s probably had enough calls from the media, it’s a wonder the damn thing’s still plugged in.

“Mrs. Reidy,” he says. He clears his throat. “It’s Vic. Victor Henriksen.”

He can remember knowing what he wanted to say to her. He’d planned in the hospital to tell her that her son was a good agent, a good partner. That he died bravely. Truth is, Victor doesn't know how Reidy died, just that Reidy screamed and the line went dead. Victor wants to think that his partner was luckier than anyone else in the station that night. That maybe he died quickly. But maybe it went on and on and Victor didn’t even look for his partner, didn’t even think to find Reidy’s body in all the other madness that was going on. He doesn’t want to lie to Reidy’s mother.

“I’m sorry,” he says, after a long while. “I’m sorry for your loss. Your son, he was a friend to me.”

He hangs up and pours himself another drink. He remembers the pot of coffee and finds it cold and stale, a bad smell in his airless kitchen. He doesn’t really want any more bourbon; he’d give anything for a good cup of coffee, a really good one. He can barely remember the last cup he drank, the last anything before hospital and IV tubes and sucking his food out of a straw.

Water bottle, maybe. Back to back with the Winchesters, a little bit of a break between the first demon, Ruby, and all the ones that came after it. Found it in the little fridge in the back and poured a little bit over his face before drinking the rest. His heart was still pounding so hard that it hurt all over his body. He looked up and through the doorway, Dean Winchester was watching him, nodding grimly to whatever Sam was saying. They made a brief sort of eye contact, and Dean's mouth twisted. Trying and failing to smile.

Funny thing was, it made Victor feel a hell of a lot better about the whole thing.

He wanders back into the living room, regards the files and papers making everything look like such a fucking mess. All of it would be boxed up, now. Sorted and archived and annotated and then put into plain, identical boxes and stuck in a basement. Part of him wants to just burn everything.

He and Reidy used to talk about it sometimes. About what they’d do when the Winchesters were finally caught. It went past ego after a while, as much as Victor had hated them at times, as much as the hunt had exhausted them. When the brothers were tripped up on a motion detector, all Victor had felt was relief. Anger as well, then and later, after Dean Winchester made googly eyes at a public defender and talked his way out of a life sentence.

Yeah, they used to talk about it a lot. Reidy was full of fantasies about where he’d go, what he’d do. Disneyland was a perennial favorite, of course. Paris, South Africa, China. The meals he’d eat on company expense, steak and oysters and sushi off of a naked body. He’d said most of it to get a rise out of Victor, like he could get a better answer than the one Victor already had.

“I’ll get drunk,” Victor had told his friend, “unbelievably drunk. And then I’ll go back to work.”

Victor lifts the glass to eyelevel. The liquid inside trembles in time with his hand. He toasts the paperwork, the television (now playing nothing more threatening than the Bachelorette), his empty house. He drains it in one long swallow and doesn’t quite make it onto the table, the glass teetering and then falling, throwing the last few drops of bourbon onto the carpet. He falls asleep where he is without even noticing what he’s done, his neck crooked and leg tucked up against the chair, the burned skin of his leg stretching in a way that will eventually wake him up in shrieking agony.

He sleeps and, eventually, dreams.

He dreams of his mother’s house. The way it was when he was a boy. Sitting at the wobbly kitchen table. He used to kick the underside of that table, finally knocked a leg off when he was thirteen. He’s a grown man in the home of his childhood. It’s summertime; he can tell by the way the sun slants warmly through the window, the only light in the darkly paneled house. He stands and walks over to the sliding doors. Anthony is playing in the yard. Trucks scattered around him in the sand, tipping out of the box and into the grass like they’re trying to escape. There’s a little girl with him, in a little white dress. She’s down there in the sand like it won’t get her white dress the least bit dirty.

Victor wants to watch Anthony play. It used to be his very best dream. He’d sit in the grass with his brother and the sun would never set. He’d wake up feeling more safe than he ever feels awake. But it’s cold even though he can feel the sun on his face, the kind of cold that burns on his skin and sets his whole body to shaking. Somehow he’s a child again and instead of reaching down to open the door he’s reaching up for it, and that’s when somebody grabs his hand.

He stares up into the face of a man he’s never seen before. A white man, maybe as old as Victor but poorly kept, soft and doughy and average looking. Victor tries to yank his hand away but he’s only a little boy now and the man holds onto him. “You don’t wanna go out there,” the man says, pointing two fingers. “Look.”

Victor looks, and sees everything that he missed when he was an adult. The rust on the toys, the trash and animal shit in the sandbox. Anthony glances over his shoulder – maybe he’s looking to see what’s keeping his brother – and his face is swollen and black, his eyes eaten out and his neck chewed open. The little girl has her hands inside of his chest like it won’t get her pretty white dress covered in rotten meat, and when she looks at Victor her eyes are white and dead as pearls.

He wakes up screaming, and the man is still there.

  



	2. Chapter 2

  


Victor flails out, forgetting all about his bad leg. The pain hits instantly and he almost topples sideways out of the chair. The man catches him and just as quickly backs off when Victor’s fists come up. He’s grinning, a little bit – eyes crinkled like it’s all so fucking funny. “Whoa, kiddo,” he says, “Slow that roll, I’m only here to help.”

“What the fuck,” Victor gasps. “What the fuck are you doing in my house? How did you do that?”

“Oh,” the man says, standing. His hands are still up, palms out, his whole body held open and harmless. “Those aren’t the questions you wanna be asking.”

“No?” Victor says. There’s a gun in the drawer right under his hand. He’s drunk or half-asleep, his whole body jangled with terror and pain, but he thinks he can get to it. “What should I be asking?”

“What’s coming for you,” the man says, and the smile drops off his face at the same moment Victor goes ice cold.

“What?” he asks.

“It ain’t her,” the man says. “But it’s bad enough that you need to be somewhere else for a little bit. _Anywhere_ else. So get a move on, Hopalong.”

Victor gets to his feet. He’s shaking so hard that he stumbles on his first step forward. The man catches him by the elbows and at his touch, the world is clear again. The haze of booze is gone and he gapes up at the man, disbelieving. “What’s happening to me?”

It’s not what he wants to ask. The man tightens his grip on Victor – it’s almost affectionate, pitying – and then releases him. Victor reels back and is shocked to find himself steadily on his feet. “Let’s go,” the man says.

He follows, his bad leg dragging behind him. The ground is wet with rain and he’s shivering as soon as they’re out the door. All he’s wearing are socks, the same thin sweatshirt he came home wearing. He brings nothing with him. It doesn’t even occur to him. There’s a white El Camino parked across the street and the man leads him to it.

“Drive,” the man says. “Far and fast as you can. Get out of the storm.”

“Where?” Victor asks.

“Anywhere but west,” the man says. He rolls his eyes, grinning companionably at Victor. It shows all of his teeth. “Hate to say it, but you’re probably safest with the Winchesters. Give ‘em a call. Don’t tell ‘em I sent you, though. We’re not the best of friends.”

He presses the keys into Victor’s hand, opens up the driver’s side door with a flourish. “Your chariot,” he says. “Now get the fuck out of here.”

“No,” Victor says. He puts a hand on the door. His teeth are chattering. “Who the hell are you? Why are you doing this?”

The man looks at him for a long time without saying anything. “It’s not really my policy to get involved,” he says. “It’s been their world for a hell of a long time and I gotta make my fun where I can find it. You dig? But hell if I need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, Vic.”

“You don’t make any fucking sense,” Victor says, and the man laughs.

“When it starts to make sense, that’s when you get the hell out. Speaking of –”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Victor says. “Not until you tell me what you are.”

The man’s grin sharpens. “Oh, I like you. You’re going to be fun, I can tell. You can call me Coyote,” he tells Victor. “I’ll see you on the flip side.”

-

 

Victor opens his eyes. There’s a long, slow moment where all he does is blink, trying to figure out what he’s looking at. It’s not his ceiling. It’s not the hospital. He’s inside of a car. He can hear traffic rushing by, close enough that he must be parked in the breakdown lane. The whoosh of air ruffles the cab’s roof, great big pouches of beige fabric pulled loose here and there like tumors.

There was a man, he thinks, and pushes himself up. It takes him even longer to figure the rest of it out. He twitches the leg of his pants up. The skin underneath is whole. The burns and wheals are gone. He moves his ankle around in its socket. It’s the first time he’s been able to do that in a month. They told him it would be years before he’d recover that kind of movement. He puts his head down against his knees and breathes slowly. He counts to sixty before he can open his eyes again.

“There was a man,” he says slowly. “He was at the hospital, too. He was in my room in the middle of the night.”

It doesn’t sound any less crazy out loud. He opens the car door and only then notices that he’s fully dressed. Nice winter jacket. Working boots, steel toes. When he steps out of the car, there’s snow to crunch under his feet. He stares down at the snow and then around himself, his lips pursed. He shakes his head and crunches over to the driver’s seat. He’s woken up in a white ’68 El Camino. The registration isn’t in the glove compartment, but there is a wallet made out of bright green stingray leather, stuffed full of hundred dollar bills. Victor leans back in his seat and rolls his eyes back up to the roof. It’s got even fewer answers for him this time, so he puts the car into gear and drives.

He pulls off at the first gas station that he sees. The El Camino isn’t dressed for snow, and it slides a little. The highway signs are useless but the gas station maps suggest Michigan.

“What the fuck,” he says, and the girl behind the counter gives him a dirty look and goes back to watching the television.

He walks up and down the aisles for lack of anything better to do. There’s more money in the pockets of his coat, wrinkled tens and fives and twenties. He can’t even imagine whose coat it is. He was in his house – he was asleep – he had a nightmare. There was a man, but that’s impossible.

“What day is it?” he asks the cashier. It spooks her and she glances under the counter where she’s probably got a gun stashed.

“Friday?” she hazards, inching towards the gun.

It was Monday, Victor thinks. His beard hasn’t been trimmed since he’s been out of the hospital, but it’s a day’s worth of growth not four, it’s fucking impossible. He stares down at cans of Dinty Moore and knows all the way down to his bones that he has lost his mind.

It’s almost a relief, actually.

That’s when he hears his name on the television.

“ – no leads on the disappearance of Special Agent Victor Henriksen of the FBI,” is what the anchor is saying. “Agent Henriksen found himself in the center of a national spotlight in February when he led the capture of the notorious Dean and Sam Winchester, who were on the FBI’s Most Wanted List for a brutal string of murders and other crimes. The home of Agent Henriksen was burned four nights ago, and police fear that he has been kidnapped in reprisal of the Winchester’s deaths.”

There’s more, but Victor doesn’t hear it. He staggers out the door, clipping his hip on a shelf of candy bars, breaking into a run once he’s outside. He hits the El Camino with both hands and holds on. The world won’t stop spinning underneath him, but when he drops to his knees in the snow, there’s nothing in his stomach to throw up.

When he can stand again, he digs his hands through the rest of his pockets. There are just enough quarters there for a phone call to a Kansas number.

The pay phone’s around the side of the gas station. Looks dusty and disused. Victor drops the coins twice as he tries to slide them into the machine, his hands shaking. He remembers the number. It rings once. Picks up in the middle of the second ring.

“Yeah?”

“Dean,” Victor says, more of a sob than a name.

There’s a long stretch of heavy silence. Victor can imagine – he used to spend hours imagining what Dean Winchester was doing, where he was doing it, and this is the image that he finds now: an abandoned house, too cold to be lived in during April and too busted open to be lived in at all. Peeling green paint in the wall, wrought iron balcony leading up to nowhere, the stairs fallen through. Dean sitting at a kitchen table, wrapped in the heaviest coat he owns.

“Victor?” Dean asks, and the sound of his own name sparks something hot in Victor’s stomach.

“Yeah,” Victor says, steadier. “Yeah, it’s me.”

“Fuck,” Dean breathes. “What the hell – how did you get out? We thought you were dead, Victor, Jesus.”

“I don’t know,” Victor says. “I think someone saved my life.”

“Your house blew up,” Dean says. He sounds as shaky as Victor does. “Your entire neighborhood burned down. Three people are in the hospital, they didn’t find your body in the house, what the _fuck_ happened to you.”

“I don’t know,” Victor says again. “I don’t know where I’ve been.”

“Where are you now?” Victor can hear the squeak of a chair against a tile floor as Dean stands. “Stay right where you are, I’ll come get you.”

“No,” Victor says, his eyes sweeping the parking list. “I need to keep moving. He said they were coming for me.”

“What? Who said that?”

Dean’s voice is abruptly tinny and far away. Victor’s eyes sweep the parking lot, the highway. His free hand goes to the charm around his neck and grips it tightly, but it’s hard to believe in it when he’s so fucking exposed. Even the stand-off at the station wasn’t this bad. He had no fucking clue how bad it could really get.

“Victor?” Dean asks. “You there?”

Victor snaps back to himself. The parking lot is empty. The girl working the gas station’s quit paying attention to him, her back to the glass front of the store.

“I’ll meet you halfway,” Victor says. “Tell me how to get to you. Tell me where you are.”

 

Dean isn’t far. Whatever hand of fate brought him to Michigan was a benign one, as far as Victor can figure. The man in his house is hazy, like a dream he didn’t really have. The radio tells him more about what happened to his house and neighbors, as he drives. No one is listening to the witnesses, who are telling anyone that will listen that animals came for them in the middle of the night, animals with black eyes and bloody hands. A few more days and the media will give Victor up for dead, buried in some backwater field or bled dry for Satanic rituals.

An old man burned alive in his bed, two houses down from Victor. He hadn’t known the old man anymore than he knew the rest of his neighbors, didn’t say hi on his way to work, didn’t sit out on sunny days. But he recognizes the man’s name and puts the pieces together as the highway markers count down – he had three grandchildren that would come to visit him every few months, sullen children who would shuffle around in their grandfather’s back garden and throw lemons over the fence.

Three people hospitalized. The teenager from three doors down, her mother. Listed in fair condition. A man who had only been driving by when the first house went up. Victor’s front door had gone through his windshield. He hadn’t regained consciousness yet.

The media had plenty of time to build a mini-frenzy in the days that Victor has lost. Serial killer culture, disintegration of the fabric of society, what are video games doing to our youth sort of thing. Victor’s familiar enough with it, same as he can figure what the media, the public, the Bureau imagines what has happened to him. It isn’t a pretty thought, but it’ll sell well enough for a few weeks. He wonders if John Walsh has run a follow-up story, asking for his safe return. He’ll have to ask Dean.

He thinks of his parents, and just as quickly pushes it away. He can’t afford to worry about them, what Josiah must think. Not until he knows what’s going on. If he’s really just losing his mind. It used to impress Victor, really. The absolute certainty of the insane. That fervent belief that their version of the world was right. He was tortured by a demon and his home has been burned to the ground, and he’s running towards a man whose family he spent the last five years hunting, and he’d give anything to have made it all up.

The news has moved on to reports of flash floods all over the country, and Victor switches the radio off, drives the last hundred miles in silence.

Dean is waiting for him, parked underneath an old trestle bridge on a road that’s more dirt than gravel. The spot is tucked away in the woods not too far off the highway. It’s isolated enough that the only sound is the crunch of his own tires, everything else swallowed up by the snowfall. There’s someone sitting in the passenger seat with Dean, probably Sam, although there’s enough snow on Dean’s windshield that it’s hard to tell. It doesn’t look like they’re talking. He can see Dean’s hands braced on the wheel.

He draws the car up close to the Chevy, close enough that their bumpers are nearly touching. Dean’s tracks are the only ones visible, and Victor’s guessing this spot doesn’t see a lot of traffic. He glances down when he pulls the keys out of the ignition, and when he looks back up Dean is alone in his car.

Victor gets out slowly, checking the surrounding hills carefully. He looks back when Dean’s door creaks shut. They’re standing kitty corner, on opposite sides of their cars and for a second they just look at each other. Dean smiles, briefly. He moves towards Victor, slipping in between their cars, and pulls Victor into a fierce hug.

Victor flinches – he can’t help it – but Dean hangs on like grim death and after a second, Victor’s arms come up and return it. He can feel Dean shivering, his breath hot on Victor’s neck. He thinks it’s the first time anyone’s touched him other than – he can’t remember, the man’s face caught in his mind and then gone completely.

Dean breaks the embrace but doesn’t pull away. One hand slides down Victor’s arm and curls around his elbow. The other is stuffed into his own jacket pocket. He doesn’t say anything. Victor thinks, distantly, that it’s a mark of how upside down the world has become that all he feels is safe and warm, standing next to a man that has haunted his nightmares for years. The silence tightens, and Victor clears his throat. Dean lets him go, glancing down at his feet. “Where’s Sam?” Victor asks, to say something.

Dean shrugs one shoulder, his mouth twisting. “Left him at a friend’s house in South Dakota. He’s … looking into something for me.”

Victor opens his mouth to ask who was in the car and where the hell did they go, but Dean cuts him off. “How did you get out? What the hell happened to you, where have you been for four fucking _days_? Why the hell didn’t you call me sooner?”

Victor shakes his head. “It hasn’t been – I don’t _know_. I fell asleep in my house and something – someone saved me. I woke up in that car and it was four days later. I don’t know what’s happening to me.”

He expects Dean to be surprised, to tell Victor that he’s going insane, but Dean frowns. “You lost four days? What the hell can do that?”

“There was a man,” Victor says slowly. It’s hard to focus on it, on the idea. There was a man. He closes his eyes. “He woke me up and told me to run. Anywhere but west. He said his name was Coyote.”

“Son of a bitch,” Dean breathes. “That smug son of a bitch, I can’t even fucking believe it.”

“What?” Victor demands. “This a friend of yours?”

Dean makes a noise in his throat, disgusted. “Something we’ve hunted. He popped up on our radar recently – God only know what he wants this time but it’s not going to be good, _fuck_ – ”

“Tell me what he is,” Victor says tightly, and Dean’s mouth snaps shut.

“We call him the Trickster,” Dean says, “and he’s a god.”

Victor waits for Dean to laugh but Dean just looks at him, his mouth drawn thin. “That’s not funny,” Victor says.

“It’s not a joke,” Dean says.

Victor pulls away from him, sags back against the car. He can feel chill metal through the seat of his pants, the backs of his knees. He holds onto that, waiting for the ground to stop spinning underneath him. “What does he want from me?” Victor asks. “What do the – the demons, what the fuck do they want from me?”

“I don’t know,” Dean says. “I wish to god I did, Victor. We had no idea she’d come for you at the station – I wouldn’t have left you if I’d thought for a second you’d be a target, you gotta know that.”

“She didn’t even ask us where you were,” Victor says, and Dean goes still.

“What?” he says, low.

“She didn’t ask us where you were,” Victor says, measuring each word carefully. “Not even once. Forty-five minutes and she didn’t ask anything. Lilith said she just wanted to have some fun. Demons, I thought – I can handle demons, I walk among evil every day, I _sleep_ in it and breathe it in. I could do that. I could do what you do and make a _difference_. I had _no idea_ what evil was, Dean. Everything is different now.”

Dean sucks in a breath. He opens his mouth to say something and Victor rides right over him. He couldn’t stop talking if he wanted to. It feels like poison leaking out of his skin. “She filleted Nancy’s skin right off her body. You remember her? Lilith made us all watch. That poor girl never. Stopped. Screaming. The deputy? She broke his bones – every single bone in his feet, then his hands, then his legs. There were three other people with us. Just bystanders, the ones who were possessed. We’d put them in one of the offices to sleep it off and she woke them up and drained all the blood out of their bodies. You wanna know what she did with it? She painted the walls – with her fingers. Like she really was a little girl. She drew us a big old sun and a house and kittens and puppy dogs and – ”

That’s when Dean kisses him. Lunges forward and shuts Victor up. His mouth is wet and soft and Victor is so shocked that he grabs Dean by the shoulders and slams him against the car. “What the fuck was that?” Victor hisses, but he doesn’t wait for an answer.

It’s awkward and violent. Dean kisses with teeth, his hands fisted in Victor’s jacket. He pushes against Victor like it’s a contest, hips grinding hard together. It’s the most alive Victor’s felt since the last time he caught Dean Winchester. He drags his hands down Dean’s back and up under his jacket without thinking of icy fingers. Dean breaks away with a gasp, shuddering all over. “Holy shit,” he says, “holy shit.”

“Get in the car,” Victor says, and Dean looks up at him through his eyelashes, mouth open and red. He licks his lips and Victor kisses him, slow. Closes his teeth on Dean’s lower lip and Dean yields to him, tips his head back and lets Victor take what he wants.

“Okay,” he says.

Dean’s on him as soon as they’re inside, one leg between Victor’s, the other pressed into the foot well, keeping him balanced. It’s so fucking hard to wait for the car to warm up, for their hands and skin to warm up, to reach for Dean and have him reach back and when he pulls Dean’s pants open his hands are still a little too cold for it. Dean doesn’t push him away. Then it’s more messy fumbling, Dean’s hand around Victor’s cock and Victor’s on Dean’s and then pushing together, closer, faster. Victor’s got all his clothes on and Dean’s got one arm pulled out of his jacket sleeve, and it’s good. So fucking good.

Afterwards, they put themselves back together without speaking. They stay in the car, knees brushing. It’s been three years since Victor quit smoking but he would kill for a cigarette now. A thought occurs to him and he leans across Dean, pops the glove compartment open. A pack of Camels are waiting for him. There’s even a lighter. “You want one?” Victor asks, and Dean shakes his head. “You mind?”

“Just crack a window,” Dean says.

The windows are steamed up. It’s snowing again, a quiet white noise as it falls against the roof of the car. Dean’s leg jiggles where it’s propped up against the dash. Victor’s first drag is amazing until he starts coughing. Dean grins. “Been a while?”

Victor rolls his eyes. They fall into a companionable silence. The thin stream of cold air leaking in through the window feels good. The warm ache of his body feels even better. There’s a comfortable lack of the need to talk about what just happened.

“You see my car?” Dean says, after a long time. Victor glances at the car and then at Dean, frowning. “She belonged to my dad. Had it since before Sammy and I were born. I rebuilt her a few years ago. The only thing that wasn’t completely fucked up was the alternator. Just about everything else is brand fucking new.”

“What happened to her?” Victor asks.

Dean laughs shakily. “T-boned by a semi,” he says. “We never even saw it coming. I was in the back, sitting on the wrong side. I was going to die, and my dad sacrificed himself for me.”

Victor sits up a little straighter. They’d thought John was dead, but there was never any proof of it, never any reason to think he was anywhere but just off the grid except for what Dean told him the first time they’d ever spoken, _my dad was a hero._

“He made a deal,” Dean continues. “He was stupid to do it. And for a long time I _hated_ him for it, for putting me in that position. But a few months ago, I was still alive to do the same thing for someone else. I’m not exactly a – a believer, that’s more Sam’s thing, but maybe there are reasons. Maybe it’s not all random fucked up evil. Maybe there’s a reason you’re still here.”

Victor closes his eyes, leans his head back against the seat. He breathes in the smells of cigarette smoke and sex, Dean’s leather jacket. “Thanks,” he says. Dean scoots closer, bumps his shoulder against Victor’s.

“I’ll keep you safe,” he says. “I promise.”

-

 

They leave the El Camino underneath the trestle, slowly being buried in the snow. Dean’s listening to the blues, which surprises Victor; witness statements have compiled a soundtrack of classic rock. The recording is old enough that it sounds like it was made underwater, the song and singer some kind of bridge between slave music and blues. He falls asleep and when he wakes up, AC/DC has replaced it and it’s the middle of the night.

“Dean,” Victor slurs, and a hand passes over his cheek and trails down his neck. He’s cold where his body has been pressed up against metal and Dean’s skin is an instant counterpoint of heat. He groans softly without even realizing it and the hand stills, one thumb pressed lightly against the line of his jaw.

“Go back to sleep,” Dean says gently.

“I can drive,” Victor says, trying to sit up. The hand presses him gently back against the seat. Victor cracks his eyes open, rubs them with the back of his good hand. Dean’s eyes are on the road, highway lights passing over his face. He looks tired. He needs a shave.

“S’okay,” Dean says. “I’m used to it, go back to sleep. We’ll get there by morning. Let’s hit up a hit a Waffle House for breakfast, okay? I fuckin’ love Waffle House.”

Victor groans again, already mostly asleep, and Dean laughs. “All right, all right. I’ll shut up.” Victor reaches for him – wraps his fingers around Dean’s wrist and squeezes, the best response he can give – and is asleep again almost before he’s let go.

They hit South Dakota a little past dawn. Victor is still asleep, and he wakes up on the way out of town. There’s a bag of donuts sitting on the seat next to him, and two large coffees held between Dean’s thighs. When Victor sits up, Dean passes him one, and they sit together in silence. When they reach Sioux Falls, Victor knows where they’re heading.

Singer Salvage Yard looks just the same as the last time Victor was there. The only detail missing is the big dog sleeping on the porch, guarding the front door from all comers. Dean walks in as if he lives there. The house smells like old books and good food. “Bobby!” Dean bellows, “we’re here!”

“Yeah, yeah,” comes a voice from the kitchen, “Quit yer hollerin’, I heard you come in.”  
  
Dean throws a grin over his shoulder at Victor. Victor grimaces and follows Dean into the kitchen.

“Special Agent Henriksen,” Bobby Singer says, resplendent in a dirty yellow apron, hands on his hips. The apron is printed with the Venus de Milo’s body and when he moves, it stretches her tits across his saggy ones. “Been a while since you’ve darkened my door.”

“Not long enough,” Victor says. They regard each other, Dean in between like a shield.

“Dean tells me you’ve quit chasin’ the good guys,” Singer says. “That a fact?”

“Yes sir,” Victor says. “Pretty sure my chasing days are over.”

Singer folds his arms across his chest. “Doubt that,” he says. “Well, you might as well come on in. If Dean’ll vouch for you, that’s good enough for me. Have a beer.” He indicates the open bottles on his counter, one for each of them. Dean rolls his eyes at Bobby. It’s as if a small argument passes between them in a look, and when it’s over Dean picks up a bottle in each hand and gives one to Victor.

“Drink up,” he says. “Make the old man happy.”

“Fine,” Victor says uncertainly. He takes a long pull from the beer, his eyes never leaving Dean’s. A slow smile spreads over Dean’s face, and Victor’s breath catches. Dean looks back to Singer.

“Satisfied?”

“I will be after you take your turn,” Singer says.

They take their beers – spiked with holy water, it turns out, but Victor’s gotten to the point where it’s kind of funny – to finish in what passes for a living room, out from under Singer’s suspicious eye. Dean makes Victor tell him all about the three times he’s previously met Bobby Singer, each time more unpleasant than the last. The last time, the dog chased them off, and Reidy didn’t stop laughing for a hundred miles.

“I’m guessing he’s not too fond of the authorities,” Victor says.

“No,” Dean says, grinning, “You could definitely say he’s not too fond. He’s never said anything about a Fed having his location, though.”

“Well,” Victor says, finishing his beer. He sets it down at his feet and leans back in the couch. He can’t lean too far before a stack of books will topple over on him. Dean is precariously balanced on the other end of the couch, looking completely at ease. “That was before I was really on _your_ tail.”

“That so,” Dean says. “Whose tail were you on?”

“Your dad’s,” Victor says shortly, but Dean just looks amused.

“Bet he led you on some good chases,” Dean says.

Victor shakes his head. “Don’t think he cared either way. There wasn’t a whole lot of pressure on him from us. He wasn’t a priority case – grave desecrations and credit card fraud, mostly. I was working the credit card angle. It was always the best way to track him. It wasn’t until he fell off the grid and you popped on it that the case became urgent.”

“Should I be flattered?” Dean asks. He seems honestly curious. Bobby curses at something in the kitchen and Victor flinches. Dean’s eyes narrow almost imperceptibly, but he doesn’t say anything.

“It was after St. Louis,” Victor tells him. “Your dad wasn’t a serial killer.”

“Lucky for him,” Dean says. “You were a big pain in our ass.”

“Glad to hear it.”

-

 

Sam puts in an appearance just before dinner is ready. He roars into the salvage yard in one of the most wrecked Fairlanes Victor has ever seen. He offers Victor a handshake but seems otherwise unaffected to see him returned from the dead. There’s a physical tension between Dean and Sam, who circle each other warily around Bobby’s house. They never stay on the same side of the room as the other, and Victor is reminded of how he felt at first, seeing them together. They had made him think of wolves. It had been Dean, back then– the way he looked up from under his eyelashes, ready and dangerous. Now Sam’s presence fills the room: Dean’s eyes always dark on his brother’s turned back, Victor and Singer orbiting around them, Sam the oblivious epicenter. Except he isn’t oblivious, really – he makes small talk with Singer but Victor can see the tension in his shoulders, the tightness around his eyes. There’s something different about Sam– he stands straighter, holds his shoulders back, and something about the line of his spine makes Victor wonder if maybe Sam has been the most dangerous Winchester all along.

Dinner is served as the sun is sliding down the copse of trees behind Singer’s house. There’s been a ham bone simmering on the stove all day and as the day dragged on, it’s evolved into red beans and rice. Dean pitched in and made cornbread from scratch, and it’s at least as good as the kind Victor buys in a box.

Sam and Singer dominate the conversation. Dean eats like he hasn’t seen food for a month, his head down. Victor tries to listen, but whenever he glances down at his bowl, he can’t look away. He has no idea when he last had a home cooked meal. Even before he ran – before the hospital – it had been months of diner food and burgers, always on the road. He’d forgotten how different it really was. He watches butter melt over his cornbread, glistening in the dim light of Bobby’s kitchen, and feels sick to his stomach.

“Victor?” Dean asks, his voice pitched low enough that Sam and Singer don’t even pause. Victor swallows.

“Fine,” he says. “I’m fine.” He looks away when Dean doesn’t, turns his face towards Sam and pointedly sticks a huge forkful of rice and beans into his mouth. He manages not to choke on it, but only barely.

They’re talking about frogs. “Plagues of ‘em,” Singer says, “and in four different states. Can’t even track a weather pattern to ‘em and they’re gone in about thirty-six hours.”

“Gone?” Sam asks, and Singer nods.

“Like they were never there,” he says. Victor shivers, and turns his face away.

After dinner, they go outside with a few beers and sit on Singer’s creaking, splintered swing. Sam props his butt up on the railing, which is sheltered from the snow by the eaves. Singer claims the king’s spot, which is an upturned packing crate. Dean presses back and forth with his heels, rocking the swing. If Dean were a cute girl in a poodle skirt this would be some sort of surreal meet-the-parents date, but what Singer has in his hands isn’t a cigar.

He takes his time rolling the joint. It’s professional, as even as if it was made by a cigarette machine. “Unless The Man wants to object,” Singer says pointedly, looking hard at Victor.

Dean smirks, and Victor rolls his eyes. “Feel free,” he says. His breath plumes out of his mouth.

Singer lights it and takes a long, luxurious toke. He passes it to the right, to Sam, who looks more comfortable with the joint between his fingers than Victor would’ve imagined. Victor hasn’t gotten stoned since college and it’s strange to see it being done so openly, without furtive glances and quick passing. Dean tips his head back and lets the smoke drift upwards into a thick halo around his head. The porch light behind them makes Dean look otherworldly.

Dean catches Victor staring and flips him a grin. He holds the joint up between his knuckles, like a cigarette. “Victor?” he asks. Somehow it’s the worst thing that Dean could have said. It’s not a challenge, just an invitation, the intimacy of his own name. It’s still a punch in the gut, to hear Dean say it. He wants to take Dean upstairs and fuck him stupid, to bend him over that dining room table, hold him open and lick him loose. He wants to go home. He takes the joint from Dean and he can see Singer relax slightly, out of the corner of his eye, like it’s another fucking test.

“This spiked with holy water too?” he asks, and Dean’s eyes widen. For a second, Victor knows he’s said the wrong thing, but Dean only shakes his head.

Their fingers brush when he takes the joint. It’s just pot. It tastes green and thick and Victor coughs on the exhale. It’s bad enough that Dean reaches over and rubs between his shoulder blades, finishes up with a good whack. “Fuck you,” Victor croaks, and Sam laughs.

They finish the joint. It comes around to Victor three, four times. He drinks his beer. It’s so much easier to listen now, to sit and watch Singer and Dean laugh together about … something, he can’t really follow the conversation all that well but it must be pretty fucking funny, they’re all laughing about it.

“And then,” Dean says, shaking. He’s grinning so hard that his face looks split in two. “And then I trip over my own fucking feet and go right into the grave, and she lands on top of me and goes, ‘I shoulda turned left at Albuquerque.’ Man, I just left that one alone, didn’t salt and burn shit. More fuckin’ power to her.”

He thinks he’s more drunk than anything else, loose-limbed, heavy in his body the way he remembers from college. He looks over his shoulder, waiting for Reidy to come out of the house and join the party already, and it actually _hurts_ to remember where he is, everything that’s happened. Reidy had a hero’s funeral and this, Victor thinks, this is life now. He lets his eyes go from Dean to Sam to Singer, over the peeling paint on the porch rail, lets himself smell old grease and whiskey in the kitchen. This is his life now. The circle of light on the porch is small and cold, the darkness behind Sam a solid force.

This is life now, Victor thinks again, and no matter how fast he runs there will always be something moving out there in the dark.

“Victor?”

It’s Dean’s voice in his ear, low and soft. He pulls back and looks at Victor carefully. His eyes are red at the corners but he’s looked tired all day. Victor looks back at him, considering, and that seems to make up Dean’s mind. “I think I’m going to put our little G-man to bed,” he says to Sam and Singer. Victor’s aware enough to see Singer’s long, considering look. He misses Sam’s eyes slide away, into the darkness, his attention already somewhere else.

Dean stays close to Victor’s elbow, like he’s stumbling drunk. He’s not even all that stoned, really. He just has to remind himself of every step, of every stack of books on the floor. The state of Singer’s house embarrasses him. When he puts his hands on the banister they come away sticky with something that isn’t quite dust. Dean’s hands are in his pockets. It makes him lean towards Victor, balancing on the balls of his feet.

“We usually just sleep downstairs,” Dean says. It’s an apology, but when he opens the door, all that Victor can think is, at least it’s clean. The room smells musty but it smells like that all over the house. There’s a thin layer of dust on the headboard. Victor sits down on the bed and only then realizes that Dean is still lingering in the doorway, watching him with dark eyes. Victor feels numb all over.

“You coming in or what?” he asks.

Dean comes in.

He comes forward until he’s standing almost between Victor’s knees, not quite touching, his hands still in his pockets. “This isn’t,” he says, and stops.

“Isn’t what?” Victor asks. He reaches for Dean, one hand on each of Dean’s hips, and Dean sways towards him, stumbles that last half-step.

“A good idea?” Dean tries, bending to kiss him. He tastes like beer and smoke and underneath just ordinary saliva, and Dean moans very softly into Victor’s mouth. He’s right – it’s not a good idea. It’s so far from a good idea that Victor used to bury this terrible idea where no one could get to it and see just how far gone he was, how deep he’d let Dean Winchester into his head. They’d have taken him off the case and he’d needed to see it done, so he never breathed a word. There was nobody who would’ve understood what Victor imagined doing to Dean Winchester.

Victor pushes up the bottom of Dean’s shirt, sets his thumbs against the hard curve of Dean’s hipbones, digs in just enough that Dean hisses through his teeth. His nose brushes against Victor’s. It’s so hard to breathe, to focus. He’s not even sure if he’s stoned anymore, if he’s even still drunk. Everywhere that Dean touches him hurts.

“You didn’t tell Sam about Coyote,” Victor says abruptly. Dean pulls back far enough to give Victor a confused look, like, you want to talk about my brother right now?

“No,” Dean says. He bites on Victor’s lower lip, gently. Testing him, Victor thinks. “Sam’s … we had a run-in with the Trickster a few weeks ago and he’s just sort of. He was different, afterwards. It put him on this time-loop, a hundred Tuesdays, and every day I died in some different, horrible way.”

“Jesus,” Victor says. He thinks of the man in his house, that open, ordinary face. He leans away from Dean, slides one hand up Dean’s side far enough that he can put his mouth on bare skin, let Dean feel his teeth. “Why would he do that?”

Dean shudders and still manages to shrug, his eyes cutting away from Victor’s. even as he tips his head back. He’s standing straight over Victor again, his hands still on Victor’s shoulders. Waiting for Victor to take the lead. “Who the fuck knows. That thing exists just to mess with people. But – Sammy changed. I think that something worse happened. I know, what could be worse than seeing me get squashed by pianos and shot in the head and run over by cars,” Dean says. He’s got one corner of his mouth quirked up, but his voice shakes, “but something was. He won’t tell me what happened, but it was bad.”

It sounds ridiculous, to Victor. A hundred Tuesdays doesn’t make any more sense than anything else Dean says, demons and possessions and sacrifice. Part of him – the part that went to church every Sunday until the Bureau became his religion – wants to ask him just how the hell demons and trickster gods can exist in the same universe, side by side like it doesn’t invalidate everything Victor’s ever been taught.

He yanks Dean closer by the hips until his shins hit the bed, until Dean has to knee-walk awkwardly up Victor’s body to keep his balance, following Victor down. Victor wants to kick his boots off, pull Dean’s shirt over his head but that would mean letting go. He runs his hands up the line of Dean’s spine, over his ribs, sucks in a long breath when Dean leans forward and presses his cock against Victor’s.

“Such a bad idea,” Dean mutters, like it was a good idea to jerk Victor off in the El Camino, like any of this is a good fucking idea. Victor laughs into Dean’s mouth and finally convinces himself to take Dean’s shirt off, to pop open the belt buckle on his jeans and shove his hand inside. He can feel a shiver in Dean’s thighs, braced on either side of his own. Victor should really take his boots off.

This is life, Victor thinks, and rolls Dean over onto the bed underneath him.


	3. Chapter 3

  


There’s someone in the room, whispering. Victor rouses slowly, his body heavy and warm. He’s naked in bed with Dean Winchester, who is also naked. Victor takes a moment to appreciate the novelty. Someone is in the room with them, whispering. Dean is facing away from Victor, so it must be Sam, speaking low and quietly to Dean. It makes sense even though when Victor finally gets one eye open, he can’t see Sam. But it doesn’t really matter.

Victor closes his eyes. He’s still asleep enough to roll over onto his side and press his face blindly into Dean’s bare shoulder. The blanket is pulled down his arm and Victor shrugs it back up, groping a little until he’s got it around his throat. The whispering doesn’t even pause; apparently Sam wasn’t worried about waking him anyway. Victor frowns. The whispering fills the room like the sound of insects, like the thud of a heart beating, but Victor can’t understand a damn thing that’s being said.

Dean pulls away from Victor, sits up in a smooth motion. The whispering stops. Victor opens his eyes again. Dean’s face is perfectly blank. He stares out into the dark room, a muscle in his shoulder jumping lightly. The light from Singer’s porch makes his eyes shine like an animal’s.

“Dean?” Victor asks. Dean twitches, glances over at him. “Where did Sam go?”

Dean frowns. He looks like he’s still asleep. He slides out of bed and dresses quickly. He shrugs Victor’s jacket on instead of his own. “ _Dean_ ,” Victor says, sharp.

“Stay here,” Dean says, and shuts the door behind himself.

He listens to the soft tread of Dean’s bare feet, the creak of the stairs. It’s quiet. The porch door complains and then slams closed. Victor pushes himself up onto his elbows. Sam isn’t in the room. No one followed Dean downstairs and out the door. He’s alone.

He’s staring at the door when it happens, as all the air in the room contracts – like the house itself sucked in a breath. It blows out across his face and Victor flinches, scrambles back against the cracked headboard. It’s gone just as quickly and he reaches up, passes a hand blindly over his cheek. There are tears there, and just the barest memory of feathers smoothed over his skin.

His heart is pounding so hard it’s an effort to unlock his elbows, push himself upright. His whole body is stuffed full and buzzing with terror – and underneath, somehow, somewhere under an unthinking void, he feels comforted.

-

 

Attempts at finding out just what the fuck happened are stymied when Victor can’t find his pants. They’re not anywhere; not on the chair, not on the bed, not under it. He gives up the effort and grabs pair of ratty old sweatpants out of the dresser. They probably belong to Singer. The shouting is just getting louder and he should get down there and see what’s going on. If anything needs doing.

It’s probably none of his business. He can barely hear Sam, who’s still talking instead of yelling. Dean’s just loud enough that Victor can hear about one word in five, shouted through double pane winter glass. He can’t even tell if it’s Sam that’s taking the brunt of it.

Dean’s jacket is downstairs, shed somewhere between the joint and taking Victor to bed. Victor pulls his T-shirt on and wraps his arms around himself, shivering. It’s April and snowing in South Dakota. He should just go back to bed, let Sam and Dean sort it out between themselves, whatever the fuck is going on.

The stairs grumble underneath his feet. The moon slices away the floor. It makes Singer’s dirty carpets look like some sort of inhuman landscape. He can’t get the feeling of feathers out of his mind and his unease only deepens when he sees Singer standing at the window, a shotgun in his hand. The man’s dressed only in a filthy wife beater and the twin of the sweatpants falling down Victor’s hips. He’s got a trucker cap jammed onto his head, pulled down a little farther to the left than it should be.

“What the hell’s the gun for?” Victor asks, drawing up next to him.

“Just in case,” Singer says, and then glances over at Victor. “Aw, hell, it’s only rock salt. Thought I saw that demon out there and even if she ain’t, it’ll do for the boys almost as well.”

“Practical,” Victor says.

Singer snorts. “Nah,” he says. “Just been too many years I’ve been letting those boys hang around here and drink all my beer. I’m a little familiar with their kind of shenanigans.”

There’s a long moment of silence between them. Outside is a copse of trees and a wide field of tall grass, and Dean and Sam are waist deep in it. They’re ashy shapes in the dark, just a blur of pale heads and hands, Sam closed in around himself and Dean’s arms flung wide. Down here, actually in view, Victor can’t hear shit.

“What the hell’s going on?” he asks.

Singer shrugs one shoulder. “Damned if I know. All I see, Dean comes storming down the stairs, doesn’t take two looks at me and goes right out the door. Made a beeline for Sam and that demon like he knew they were out there.” He shakes his head. “Those boys’ve been here near two weeks now. Sam stays out all night and I never once wondered what he was up to out there.”

“Sam’s changed,” Victor says. He stares out across the field, trying to see more clearly. Dean’s moving back and forth in the grass, Sam’s shoulders thrown back. He can’t see any demon out there with him, but he guesses that’s not any kind of guarantee.

It’s freezing inside the house and Victor shudders up and down his whole body. Singer gives him a look, but all he says is, “Like a flipped switch.”

There’s a long stretch of silence. Victor wishes he could hear anything. The way Singer’s jaw is set in hard lines makes him think that the old man knows more than he’s letting on, but he’s had some hard experience with the exact width of Bobby Singer’s stubborn silence. Dean stalks away from Sam. The wind’s up and he has to lean into it to get away from his brother.

Victor shifts from foot to foot. It’s like watching a fire and he knew it wasn’t any of his business, anyway. He managed socks before he headed downstairs but he can still feel the floor beneath his toes, icy and hard. “Is your house haunted?” he asks, after a moment.

Singer frowns at him. “Better not be. This place is Fort Knox,” he says, thumping the windowsill with his knuckles. “But why’re you asking?”

Victor opens his mouth to explain the whispering, the feathers against his skin. He’s not sure if he could put it into words, but he’s saved the trouble when Dean hauls off and punches Sam in the face.

Sam falls into the grass, and Victor and Singer are out the door. It slams behind them and Victor sees Dean’s head shoot up and then turn deliberately away. Victor’s off the porch and thigh deep in the long grass before he remembers that there’s a fucking demon out there in the dark and the only place that he should be is inside of Fort Knox. He hesitates, stumbles over something in the grass that sends a bolt of sharp pain through his leg, and then Dean hits Sam again. He can hear the crack of it over the wind and he’s moving again, shooting past Singer and hitting Dean hard enough that they both go tumbling. Dean lands hard on top of him, his shoulder digging into the meat of Victor’s chest, and Victor sucks air between his teeth from the shock of it. He’d missed seeing the ice on the long grass, and it hurts on the bare skin of his arms. Dean fights him, but by the time he wiggles out of Victor’s grip and gets back on his feet, Singer is between them. The shotgun in his hands is enough of a warning that Dean hangs back sullenly.

“Three weeks,” Sam says into the wind. He wipes his sleeve across his face, only smearing the blood from his nose and mouth. Dean’s panting hard enough that his breath comes in harsh bursts of smoke out into the cold air. “Three weeks _tonight_. Did you even realize what day it was, Dean? Did you have any idea? Or did you just have more important things to think about?”

“I don’t know how else to say it, Sammy,” Dean growls. “I’m not letting you do this.”

“You don’t have a _choice_ ,” Sam says. “You want me to just sit back and do nothing but I _can’t_. I can’t just sit and wait. All this time, we haven’t come up with anything better – ”

“It’s not worth it,” Dean says. He steps towards his brother and Sam takes a step back. Victor grabs Dean’s shoulder. He doesn’t even seem to notice and Victor keeps his hand where it is, ready to pull Dean back again. “Sam,” Dean says, softer. Pleading. “It’s not worth it.”

“Three weeks is _nothing_ compared to four months,” Sam says, and Dean jerks back. His hands fall at his sides. Singer turns towards Sam.

“What?” he says, echoed by Dean.

“What are you talking about?”

“Four months,” Sam says again, his voice breaking halfway through. He holds Dean’s eyes. The wind cuts through Victor’s t-shirt. He’s shaking as hard as Dean is. “That’s how long the Trickster left you dead. So don’t tell me what’s _fucking_ worth it. I’ll do what I have to, Dean. If this is the only way that I can save you, then it’s what I’m going to do.”

Victor can’t see Dean’s face from where he’s standing, but he sees Dean lean back, feels his body hunch in on itself. The jacket that Coyote left for him is brushed with ice under his hand, and when they go inside it will smell like wet dog. Victor looks back and forth between Sam and Dean, looks to Singer for some kind of signal or guidance. Not a one of them look his way. The situation doesn’t concern him at all.

“You,” Dean says, and clears his throat. Every word is clear and distinct and drops into Victor’s stomach like a hot stone. “You would’ve cut that poor girl’s heart out, wouldn’t you?”

Sam says nothing, just looks stonily at Dean. He wipes blood off his chin again and Dean turns away. He spreads his hands at his side, staring blindly into the night. The grass crackles and then the demon is back at Sam’s side, hands on her hips. Singer brings the gun up, but Dean doesn’t even turn around.

“If I didn’t know you,” Dean says, in the smallest, most broken voice Victor has ever heard, “I would hunt you.”

-

 

Victor wakes up alone. He’s not all that surprised. He stares at his hand, the palm turned up towards the ceiling, his fingers curled together. His fingernails are nearly halfway grown back, and the skin where they used to be has grown nearly as tough as the rest of his hand. There’s sunlight in the window and the curtains twist gently, stirred by the vent underneath.

Singer is in the kitchen. “Coffe’s on,” he says, without looking up. He’s got a book spread out in front of him that’s nearly as big as the table. As Victor watches, he turns the page with one rubber glove-covered hand.

Victor helps himself. The coffee’s better than Victor’s expecting. He blows over the black surface meditatively. His chest hurts where Dean’s shoulder slammed into it. He stares blearily out the kitchen window, waiting for his eyes to properly focus, and it takes him a long time to see Dean.

Dean is in the same clothes that Victor saw him pull on last night. Victor’s coat is spread over the hood of some ancient beast of a car, Dean draped on top of it. He’s got enough grease up and down his arms that Victor can guess what he’s been up to since Sam stormed off, taking the demon with him. He’s rolling an empty beer bottle between his hands, his chin tilted up towards the sky.

“Sam’s gone, huh?” Victor asks. There’s a pointed silence behind him, the whispery sound of another page being turned. Victor takes a sip of his coffee. It’s the best coffee he’s had in months. He finishes his cup and then rinses it out, leaving it to dry next to the sink.

He’s at the door when Singer speaks. “Where do you think you’re going?” Victor looks back over his shoulder. Singer has turned towards him, one hand dangling over the back of his chair. The way his fingertips swing back and forth make Victor think that Singer’s got a weapon close by.

“I thought Dean could use a distraction,” Victor says, and Singer considers him for a long moment, his eyes narrow.

After a second, Singer huffs a sigh and drops his eyes. When he looks back, Victor could swear there’s a smile hidden there. “I chased you off my porch with a shotgun a few years back, didn’t I?” Singer asks abruptly.

Victor rolls his eyes. “You did, sir. Me and my partner both. Told us to _git_.”

Singer grins. It wasn’t very funny at the time, even though it wasn’t the first time they’d been run off by a hillbilly and Reidy thought it was fucking hilarious, but Victor finds himself smiling back. “Sorry,” Singer says. “Guess I misjudged you.”

“I get that a lot,” Victor says. There’s a moment of awkward silence, where Victor almost thinks that Singer will tell him what the fuck is going on, what he wandered into the middle of. It passes, and Victor slips out the door, heads into the yard with his hands in his pockets.

Outside, the yard is blinding. Cracked windshields blur the light into a thousand different sunbeams. The air smells wet and muddy. Steam rises from the puddles underneath Victor’s feet. He stops by the bumper of a worn out Valiant, lifts his shoes up and peers at the crap stuck to the bottom. It’s hard to imagine a god that would kill Dean Winchester over and over again to prove a point, and lead Victor to safety with a good pair of shoes on his feet and just enough change to make a phone call to Kansas.

“You gonna shit or get off the pot?” Dean calls, and Victor straightens.

Dean’s slouched down far enough that his back is propped against the low windshield of the car, his legs kicked out in front of him, ankles neatly crossed. He lifts a fresh beer in Victor’s direction with a crooked smile.

“Your momma ever teach you to share?” Victor asks. Dean nods his head towards the brown bag near the left tire. They’re not twist-off; he hands the beer to Dean to pop open with his ring. Their fingers brush as Dean hands the beer back. Victor parks himself on the bumper. He can see Dean’s boots out of the corner of his eyes, twitching back and forth. The sun feels good on Victor’s shoulders.

“Momma didn’t teach me nothing,” Dean declares. Victor glances over his shoulder, but Dean’s head is tipped back. He’s smiling into the sky. His eyes are unfocused enough that Victor can guess he started on the twelve pack a while ago.

He jostles Dean’s foot with his shoulder. The muscle protests a little, shoots a dull ache into the other muscles in his chest. Dean glances down. Victor stretches his beer towards Dean, holds it out until Dean clinks against it with his own.

“Little early for it,” Victor says, taking a long pull off his drink.

“Beautiful morning,” Dean says.

“Guess so,” Victor allows. He lingers over his beer. The coffee tasted better and it’s still cold outside, his breath fogging in the bright sunlight. The wind rustles over the bare skin of his neck and he shivers, thinking of feathers.

“What was that, in the room?” he asks abruptly.

“Hmm?” Dean asks. The left boot shifts over the hood, inches closer to Victor. “What’re you talking about?”

“Something told you where Sam was,” Victor says. “What he was doing with the demon, whatever that is.”

Dean is quiet for a long time. Victor stays still, doesn’t look around him. They used to find stripped beer bottles wherever the Winchesters shacked up, worried and scraped beer bottles with the labels peeled away and stuck inside the empties. Reidy’s opinion was that it was Sam’s nervous habit, guilt over witnessing his brother’s monstrous actions, but Victor had always held forth for Dean. Dean needed things to do with his hands.

“I don’t want to know,” Dean says. Victor takes that as his signal to look and when he does, Dean is flicking glued strips of paper off of his fingertips. Score one for the home team. “It didn’t turn out so well the first time,” he continues. “Sometimes it’s just better not to ask.”

“You don’t think that,” Victor tells him, and turns back around. He lets the silence stretch and linger between them. It feels comfortable enough to him, even though he can feel Dean’s eyes heavy on the back of his head. Let him work it out, Victor thinks, but he’s glad when Dean doesn’t ask the next question, the one that for just a second Victor thinks he’ll have the balls to ask: _Do you think it’s worth it?_

It’s not something he can answer. Not now, when he’s still looking over his shoulder and jumping at shadows. Maybe not ever.

“I was thinking,” is what Dean says instead. Casually, like it’s not important. He’s carefully not looking at Victor, his eyes going back and forth between the mangled beer label and his feet. “We should hit the road today. After lunch, maybe. Sam and I, we were due to get the stocks back up a few weeks ago. We make a pretty good circuit every few months to resupply, see some old friends. When Sam comes back, he’ll kick my ass if I forgot to get his stupid favorite silver bullets or whatever. You down for a road trip, Victor? See the sights, maybe kill a few spooky things?”

“Sure,” Victor says, surprised, and Dean lights up all over.

“Cool,” he says. “Good.”

-

 

Victor tastes heat on the air, so thick that it lingers on the tongue when he sucks in a breath. It tastes of dusty roads and the Gulf, of trash burning in fields. It weighs down his arms and ankles. He wants to sink down into the earth and sleep. He knows that he’s asleep – knows that he went to bed in the dry air of a motel, scratchy sheets nestled up against his chin, the soft scraping of Dean’s knife against a stone in his ears.

He’s dreaming. Outside of the dim light, somebody is screaming. But they’re not screaming, not really; there’s a bad sound system set up and a microphone held too close to bared teeth, but just because Victor can’t understand a fucking word doesn’t mean that he doesn’t know a sermon for what it is.

“Satan’s church,” Reidy says, thoughtfully. Victor looks over at him. His neck lolls and his chin follows it. Reidy’s face is soft and unfocused. Victor laughs because he knows this one, he remembers that church; some backwater menace that they could hear out the window of some backwater motel they’d been staying at. It started up when the sun went down and you could hear the drums until almost dawn, Satan’s church they’d called it. The pastor’s voice so hateful and distorted by the speakers that it was impossible not to imagine sulfur and flames licking at his cheeks.

The heat and Satan’s favorite preacher had made it impossible to sleep, and they’d stayed up every night until the drums fucking quit, drinking whiskey and beer, slapping mosquitoes off their arms.

“You remember,” Victor says, “that crawfish you ate, and after dinner we walked down to the river, and you had that bottle from god knows where, and we drank the whole thing because we were so sure we were going to get the Winchesters this time. You were so sick the next day and you kept saying, it’s the crawfish, it’s the crawfish.”

Reidy tips his head back and laughs. It had all been so long ago that _the Winchesters_ had meant _John and Dean_ , not _Dean and Sam_ , and Victor laughs with him at the familiarity of it all. He wants to tell Reidy how much he’s missed him, because even in a dream he knows that Reidy is dead and buried, thousands of miles away from Satan’s church, just another white headstone in a sea of white headstones set neatly in rows. They laugh together, and when Satan’s pastor starts to tear Heaven a new one they look at each other and laugh even harder.

“You,” Victor says, wiping his eyes. “We were friends.”

Reidy grins at him, and holds out a glass for him to toast. It’s not even glass; it’s the plastic cups from the motel room, sweating in the night air. Victor has one too, fuller than Reidy’s, and he knocks them together clumsily.

He sees her out of the corner of his eyes, swinging little patent Mary Janes back and forth through the air because her feet don’t reach the ground. She’s sitting on top of the motel dresser, and every once in a while her foot knocks against the empty drawers and a hollow, ugly thump echoes through the room. Reidy’s sitting outside on their miserable little balcony, knees up to his chest on a saggy lawn chair. Victor can see fireflies from where he sits, back propped up against the sliding door, still halfway in the room. The little girl’s shoes thump, thump, thump against the wood.

“Do you remember what happened after that?” Reidy asks. He’s grinning so hard that his eyes are slitted nearly closed. His tie is pulled open, his shirt halfway unbuttoned.

“Texas?” Victor guesses. “Texas, the guy with the mullet, who picked a fight with me in the bar.”

“I can’t even remember,” Reidy says sadly. Victor can barely hear him over the drums. Stretching under their balcony is the motel parking lot, glittering with broken glass. Beyond that is a field, and shapes in the darkness that could be houses or trees, then the river, and across the river is Satan’s church. There’s a puff of warm air in his ear. The mild, sour smell of a child’s breath. Her dress is made of taffeta and it crinkles quietly as she leans in close and kisses him on the cheek.

“I remember,” Victor says abruptly as she trails sticky fingers over his forehead, down his cheek. “North Carolina. That was the first time I met your mother.” He can’t move. His eyes flicker over Reidy’s face, watches him rub his chin as he tries to remember. Reidy snaps his fingers as the little girl’s find the corner of his right eye, press tentatively in, feeling the wet shape of them underneath his eyelid.

“Shit,” Reidy says, “yeah. She baked like crazy that whole week.” Oily rainbows swim across his vision as she presses harder, works her finger in. She twitches her hand up and down, opening and shutting his eye like it’s a game, because it is – she told them over and over, squealing and giggling and skipping around the police station. It was a game. There’s a scream in Victor’s throat. “She thought we were investigating X-files. We threw you a proper Southern barbeque.”

Victor’s eye bursts like she cut it open with a knife. Reidy doesn’t even notice. The scream shakes Victor’s whole body but he can’t move his jaw, he can’t move anything as the wet, thick insides of his eyeball slide down his cheek. All he can force out is a thin noise, _mmmmm_ , like leaking balloon. Her fingers slide up over his scalp, behind the curve of his ear.

“ _Smartypants_ ,” Lilith whispers into his ear. “I can’t believe you went and tattled on me to the Winchesters! That wasn’t very nice at all.”

“Hey Vic,” Reidy says, “I got a good one. Okay, you ready? You know what I’m gonna do when we catch the Winchesters?”

Lilith jams two little fingers into his ear. The eardrum ruptures instantly and the pain is worse than when she pulled his fingernails and toenails out one by one, when she burned the skin off his ankles. “ _Mmmmmmmm_ ,” Victor shrieks, as best as he can.

“That’s what _I'll_ do,” Lilith says sweetly. “I’m going to make you into hamburger and I’ll feed it to my doggies. You just wait, we’re gonna have so much fun when I find you, Mr. Henriksen.”

“I’m gonna come back here someday and I’m going to find Satan’s church,” Reidy says with satisfaction, “and I’m going to throw those fucking speakers into the river.”

“I’m gonna find you,” Lilith tells him. She presses another kiss to his face, right next to his bleeding ear. “ _He_ can’t hide you and Dean from me forever. There’s nothing he can do to stop it once I let my doggies out to play. No takebacks, not with me! I just don’t think it’s _fair_ , do you?”

Victor chokes on his own vomit, filling his mouth with the taste of bourbon and acid. It slides over his tongue and leaks out of the corner of his mouth. The motel is gone. He’s back at the police station, pinned on Nancy’s desk, surrounded by broken plaster saints. He can’t breathe because he’s crying too and there’s snot clogging up his nose. He’s going to _suffocate_ and suddenly his intestines are back inside of his body and it’s going to start all over again.

“Mr. Henriksen,” Lilith tells him, wiping away the tears rolling down his face, “I can’t wait to play with you some more.”

-

 

Victor jolts awake and hits his head on the door handle of the Impala. He drops back against the seat and claps his hands to the top of his head.

“What the fuck was that?” Dean asks. “You okay?”

Victor lets his breath hiss out between his teeth before he answers. “Yeah,” he says. “Fine.” He probes the hurt spot on his scalp; it feels like there’s a split there.

“You have a good nap?” Dean asks. He looks over his shoulder to where Victor’s still lying down in the backseat, staring up through the window above his head.

“Yeah,” Victor says again thickly.

“Didn’t sound good,” Dean says. “Didn’t sound good at all.” Victor winces. He pushes himself upright and drapes his arms across the front seat. Dean’s shoulder is sun warm against his elbow and after a second Dean presses into the touch. Victor watches mile markers pass.

“No,” Victor says, after a long time. “It wasn’t.”

He presses his fingers lightly against his eyes. It’s a relief to find them both still there.

They stop for lunch. Dean fills in the silence until they get there. He talks _all the time_. The first week that they were on the road, he started telling stories and he still hasn’t quit. He answers every single one of Victor’s questions. He’s told Victor the best way to take out vampires, werewolves, ghosts, evil clowns that eat people, lake monsters, shape shifters. Every lesson comes attached to anecdotes and tangents. He explains St. Louis, the corpse he left behind that had turned to soup by the time they dug it up only two months after the fact. St. Louis turns into Milwaukee and Victor finds he can actually laugh at it, he and Reidy stranded like a couple of brides at the altar while Sam and Dean slipped right out in SWAT gear. When they stop for the night, Dean brings out a journal full of careful handwriting that Victor remembers from hundreds of gas station receipts and motel sign-in books. The first entry dates from when Dean was eleven years old. Victor’s first wife showed him her diary once, and it had embarrassed him horribly to read how far she had opened herself to it. She’d divorced him three months later and even though it hadn’t anything to do with the diary, not really, it’s what he thinks about as he looks through Dean’s journal. It’s too personal, even though it’s as dry as Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Dean studiously doesn’t look for Victor’s reaction.

And even for all of that, Victor doesn’t catch on to what Dean’s doing for almost two weeks, not until they’ve filled up on silver and holy water and gris gris and Victor has a shiny new cell phone with an address book full of hunters, does Victor finally fucking figure it out.

When it happens, they’re in a roadhouse just south of Tucson. As soon as they swing the doors open, a tense silence falls over the room. He can hear his boots clumping over the hollow floor and is reminded, a little giddily, of an old Western showdown. The woman at the bar looks over her shoulder and a grin splits her face as she sees Dean. It slips just as quickly off when she spots Victor.

“Dean Winchester,” she says. “What a lovely surprise. Haven’t seen you for quite a while.”

“Nearly a year,” Dean agrees. “Nice place you’ve got now, I like it.”

“Who’s your friend?” she asks. “Looks awfully like that dead FBI agent that came knockin’ around the old place a few times.”

“He gets that a lot,” Dean says. “Ellen, meet Victor. Victor, Ellen.”

“Pleasure to meet you,” Victor says, and she shakes his hand. She has a firm, dry grip.

“Likewise,” Ellen says, “In an official capacity, at least. That was a big fuckin’ mess you left in D.C., wasn’t it? How’d you get out of that?”

Victor hesitates, and Dean fills in for him, “Guess he’s just that much of a bad ass. Lay off the man, he’s new to the life.”

“You showing him the ropes?” Ellen asks, cracking open a couple of beers for them, and that’s when it hits Victor that Dean’s doing exactly that. He glances away from the bar and realizes abruptly that he recognizes most of the faces in the room. They’re all people he’s questioned or investigated, hillbilly freaks with tenuous connections to John Winchester or any of the other psychos that had been his caseload before Dean Winchester started slaughtering people in St. Louis. Now he watches each of them look him carefully up and down, and turn away. Accepting his presence among them.

It hits him like a physical blow, when he remembers the police station, the oil on his fingers as he pushed shotgun shells into place. The look on Dean’s face, watching Victor’s whole world become meaningless.

Victor slides off his barstool on shaking legs, walks around the bar to the flickering, grimy bathroom. The only stall is missing a door and the mirror is made out of metal, and he runs cold water over his face because he doesn’t want this. There’s no good fight left in him. He should have died back in Colorado, been burned alive in his own home because he isn’t strong enough for this.

When Victor doesn’t come back, Dean comes looking, finds him perched on the edge of that stained toilet seat, shaking too hard to stand up. Dean doesn’t say anything, just slides down the wall and stretches his legs out. Sits quietly until it passes.

That had been April 28th. Ellen had handed Dean a manila folder stuffed full of newspaper clippings and kissed him on the cheek as they’d left. She hadn’t said much to Victor, but on their way out the door she grinned at him in an almost friendly sort of way and said she’d see him around.  
  
Dean spreads Ellen’s folder over the diner table. He doesn’t bother to hide them when the waitress comes by to take their orders: Dean gets waffles, Victor orders the hash. “Victor,” Dean says, “That totally defeats the purpose of Waffle House.”

He lays the case at Victor’s feet. A few months earlier, a body had been found by a group of local boys hanging out at the small graveyard at the edge of town. “What were they doing at the graveyard?” Victor asks, frowning over his hash.

“Getting stoned, having sex, who cares,” Dean says. “This is the cool part, so listen up: the body had been stuffed inside of a hollow tree, and it’s been there for at least two years.” He makes a ta-da! motion with his hands, grinning. It falters only a little bit when Victor only rolls his eyes.

Jane Doe – or what was left of her – had been laid to rest in the same hallowed ground that she’d been hanging out in for the last couple years, but since then, people had been turning up suspiciously dead. Four so far, the last about a week prior, each one with their mouths stuffed full of taffeta. “Same cause of death,” Dean supplies, his own mouth stuffed full of waffles. His eyes are wide enough that they catch the sunlight streaming through the diner’s windows, bright and green and waiting.

Victor twitches his fork back and forth, tapping against the rim of the plate. He wonders what Dean would do if he said no, if he said he wanted to go home, to go back to Bobby’s house, to crawl into a bottle and never come out. “Ghosts?” he asks, and Dean grins.

“Simple salt and burn,” he says. “I’ll even let you hold the matches.”

  



	4. Chapter 4

  


Grave desecration, Victor finds, is a surprisingly matter-of-fact operation. He had imagined it as something the Winchesters did for fun – necrophilia, drunken sacrifice, maybe a little incest under the full moon – the usual psychopathic bullshit. The reality is he follows Dean up and down rows of tombstones, looking for fresh graves. It’s cold and damp and threatening to rain, and the flashlights they’ve brought don’t do shit to make the headstones legible. Half of them are marble, which only reflects the light; they have to stop for each likely candidate and peer closely at the writing on the stone to see if it could be their girl.  
  
It’s a big cemetery for a small town, Victor thinks, but they got there at dusk and he hasn’t even seen the town; he’s not sure if he will, if they’ll stop and stay the night or keep on driving. They’ve got a room at the motel a mile up the road, but Dean is tense and animated and just as likely to push them on to the next town. Sam’s been gone just shy of three weeks, and Victor never asked just what the fuck kind of deadline he was talking about in Bobby Singer’s back field. It occurs to him now and then to ask, and every time he remembers how neatly he’d been cut out of the equation that night. He doesn’t understand why Dean has taken him under his wing, taken those ominously mentioned three weeks to drive around and show Victor how to be a hunter. He knows twenty different poker cheats and a dozens of easy frauds, and it’s even easier to fake an official ID than Victor knew.

They take a break underneath the wide branches of an old tree. Victor squints up at it; the branches are black against black, and it’s probably Victor’s imagination filling in the blanks as he listens to the wind rustle through the season’s first leaves above his head. Dean hands him a flask; his fingers are wet and clumsy against Victor’s. He’s shivering even harder than Victor is, but when Victor catches his eye, Dean grins and flashes him a thumbs up.

“It’s cool,” Dean says. “It really, really is. I’m fine.”

“What?” Victor asks.

“Nothing,” Dean says, and tips his head up towards the tree and the sky above them. Victor’s looking right at Dean when the whole sky lights up – thunder rumbles a few seconds after, and they look at each other. “Let’s pop your cherry and get someplace warm and dry, cool?”

“Cool,” Victor agrees, hitching the duffel up on his shoulder.

They find the grave pretty quickly after that, and Victor’s quick to learn that digging up a grave isn’t really anybody’s idea of fun. The shovel that Dean gives him is cheap and rough, and three feet down he gives himself one hell of a splinter in his palm. “Shit,” he mutters, jamming the heel of his hand into his mouth, and Dean laughs. “Fuck you,” Victor tells him, but it is kind of funny. He knocks an elbow into Dean’s side, and Dean jabs him back, and somehow it ends with Victor’s back against the wet side of the grave, Dean pressed against him from knees to chest. He’s laughing breathlessly; they both are. He feels like he’s standing at the edge of the world. He can’t catch his breath. He drops the shovel and pushes his hands down underneath Dean’s collar, looking for skin and heat and something to ground him.

Dean’s _shaking_ again, his whole body, and something in the tremor of his hands, the knuckles just brushing Victor’s chin where he’s got them fisted into the front of Victor’s jacket – it’s _terrifying_.

Victor pulls back. Turns Dean deliberately so their positions are reversed. Dean watches him with dark, open eyes. Like he’s waiting for Victor to put him on his knees in the grave dirt. Victor kisses Dean – holds him in place and just breathes with him for long minutes until Dean stops shaking like a frightened animal. It’s hard do to it; Dean presses his hips forward in long, smooth movements, each one lined up so fucking perfectly, pushing his dick against Victor’s. It crosses his mind that this is more like what he thought grave desecration would be like.

“Dean,” Victor says, “What the fuck is going on?”

“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dean mutters into Victor’s neck, teeth a sharp curve against skin. Dean’s nose is icy cold and Victor shudders, leans into the bite.

“Don’t mess with me,” Victor warns, and pulls Dean’s head back, his fingers curled tight into the short hairs at the back of Dean’s skull. Dean _whimpers_ and it shocks Victor, that frantic vulnerability. He could do anything to Dean.

“Not,” Dean pants. “I’m not – fuck – ”

“What’s gonna happen?” Victor pushes. Dean’s sliding in the wet ground; he hooks an elbow into the sod, fighting gravity, and Victor pushes his fingers up under Dean’s jacket, palm against the scarred, hot skin of Dean’s stomach. Lets Dean feel the promise implicit. “Three weeks is up tomorrow night. What’s gonna happen?”

“The end of the world,” Dean says. It’s a joke, but he’s not even smiling.

“Fuck you,” Victor tells him, and Dean grins hard and sharp.

“Promise?” he asks, and that’s when the earth moves under their feet.

There’s a second where they only look down at the ground, then at each other, then down at the ground again where the first raindrops are washing away the dirt from a rotted hand. It’s on Victor’s tongue that he thought she’d at least be in a fucking coffin, and then the hand moves. They’re out of the grave like it’s just caught fire, and that’s when Victor looks around and sees the earth humping up around them, bits of hair and teeth and shoulders pushing through.

“What the fuck,” Dean breathes, and Victor laughs in spite of himself.

“I thought you’d know,” he says.

“Uh,” Dean says. “Nope. I mean, I’ve seen Night of the Living Dead like thirty times but this is kinda – ”

A woman in a no-color taffeta dress, stained with body fluids and mud, wiggles and shoves until she’s got one arm free of her own grave. She waves it vaguely in their direction, grumbling. Her hair is flattened over her face but Victor can tell she was buried in a bouffant. “Braaaaaains,” Dean supplies, and Victor elbows him hard in the side.

“What the hell do we do?”

“Removing the head or destroying the brain works pretty well in the movies,” Dean says, grinning, and lets out a savage, joyful whoop. Every single zombie turns to look at them.

-

 

“Look,” Dean says, “I might’ve gotten a little carried away, but seriously. Seriously, do you know how often I’ve fought a horde of zombies? Never, Victor. I have never fought a horde of zombies. I’ve been waiting all my life to fight a horde of zombies and I’m kinda sorry you had to see that but what a fucking bang that was. Right?”

He’s got one hand fisted in Victor’s jacket, right at the shoulder, his other hand brushing gore off his own face. There’s a chunk of something, mud or brains or meat, buried in Dean’s hair and Victor pulls it out before he lets himself really think about it, tosses it somewhere on the floor of their motel room. He sags against Dean, lets himself be held up and walked across the room and put down on the bed. His hands hang between his knees. He can’t stop _grinning_.

Because it was amazing. Running through a _horde_ of _zombies_ , who shambled and stumbled and moaned their way slowly across the graveyard. And maybe later Victor will think about the way the sharp end of the shovel split that woman’s head in half like a rotted melon. Every one of them had been dressed so neatly that he thinks he could drive himself crazy imagining the hands that straightened their father’s tie, that arranged their daughter’s necklace just so.

“Simple,” Victor says, drawing each word out, “salt. And. Burn.”

“Horde of _zombies_ ,” Dean says. “Cross that one off the to-do list, stick a fork in me, I’m done.”

“Fuck,” Victor says. He reaches up for Dean, just wanting to grab something warm and hold onto it for a little while, but his hands find Dean’s jacket and pull it down his shoulders, bunching at his elbows where Dean’s still hanging on to Victor. Dean goes still and taut and it’s only when Victor glances up and actually looks at Dean that he remembers everything he wanted to do to Dean in that graveyard. He stands up on shaky legs and Dean takes a step backwards, looking lost in his filthy, too-large jacket. Victor pulls it the rest of the way off, lets it drop to the carpet. It makes the same noise that the shovel did, hitting the bottom of the grave.

When he reaches forward, wraps a hand around the back of Dean’s neck and tugs, Dean comes to him easily, lets Victor turn him around, sink his teeth down into the ridge of spine and nerves, fumble with his belt. The buckle clinks, loud in the empty room. Dean’s panting open-mouthed, his chin tipped up towards the ceiling. Eyes closed. Swaying on his feet.

He’s clumsy with Dean. Uncertain. Every part of his body is jumpy with adrenaline. He drags Dean’s zipper down, strokes the back of his hand over Dean’s underwear. The material is thin and hot and Dean shivers.

Victor walks Dean forward until they hit the door, reaches down for one hand and then the other, holding them up against the wall long enough that Dean gets the point and leaves them there. He nudges Dean’s legs open, wraps both hands around Dean’s hips and digs his thumbs into the muscle above Dean’s ass. Dean writhes against the door, a surprised noise escaping him. He looks over his shoulder at Victor, and Victor kisses him before he can say anything, shuts him right the fuck up as he bites and sucks his way down the hard line of Dean’s jaw, his throat.

He pushes Dean’s jeans down as far as he can, which isn’t that far. The waistband has cut a thin red line into Dean’s skin and Victor passes a finger over the mark absently. Dean pushes his hips back into Victor’s, trapping Victor’s hand between their bodies.

“Dean,” Victor says, purposelessly, just to say it. “Fuck.”  
  
It’s rough – there’s nothing that resembles lubricant in a dirty, worn out motel room and even if there was this is new to Victor and he feels stupid and shy, rubbing wet fingers around Dean’s hole, trying not to hurt him when he pushes them in. Dean reaches back and cups the back of Victor’s skull, holding him close, twisted around so far that their mouths are almost touching. The heater clunks, turning itself on and neither of them notice. It takes a long time to open Dean up, to stretch him on nothing but spit and the slick from Victor’s dick. Long enough that Victor’s panting raggedly as he holds Dean still and pushes in. His hands shake on Dean’s hipbones. Dean presses his mouth to Victor’s forehead, his ear, anything he can get to.

He can feel that edge underneath his feet, opening wide as he fucks Dean Winchester, and this time he lets himself fall right over the rim.

-

 

“It was the kind of day that makes you feel like you’re suffocating in your skin,” Victor says. “Middle of summer. My brother was three years older than me, so he was nine and I’d turned six about half a week before. It was his job to watch me during the summer when we were out of school, and I’d been ragging on him all day that I wanted a soda.”

Later. Much later. Some sort of nameless time between midnight and dawn, and they’ve been talking for hours. It’s aimless conversation, the kind that only happens at this hour of night. Victor feels like he’s been drinking for days, his body wrung out and hurting. They’re passing a cigarette back and forth, Dean’s palm rubbing circles up and down Victor’s side. He knew all along that he would tell Dean Winchester this secret.

“So Anthony finally just gives up and walks me down to the store. It was about a mile from where we were living at the time, out in the suburbs. We had this big old back yard, bigger than anybody else in the neighborhood. Anthony had a lot of friends there and I just liked tagging along. Everywhere he went, I’d be right there too. But that day it was just him and me, and when we got to the store he made me wait outside while he bought the sodas. He didn’t have any money, he was gonna steal the sodas for me. I had to sit outside so it would be less suspicious.”

Dean exhales a long stream of smoke from his nose. His chin is tucked towards his chest. His hair is snarled and fluffed high on his head. There’s hair gel on Victor’s fingers. “I’d make Sam stand guard when we had to dumpster dive,” he offers. “Didn’t want him to see me doing stuff like that.”

Victor shakes his head. Their fingers brush as Dean gives him the cigarette and he runs the backs of his fingers down Dean’s wrist before drawing back. Their legs are tangled together. He can feel the weight and shape of Dean’s dick against his thigh. Flaccid now, after up against the wall and in the shower and on the bed.

“We’d watched this movie the night before that scared the pants off of me,” Victor says, after a long time. He sucks in a lungful of smoke, lets it drift out of his mouth towards the ceiling. Takes another one to steady himself. It’s still hard to say the words out loud. “Some monster movie. So he told me to sit my butt down and wait for him, otherwise the monster would come and get me. It was a werewolf, some stupid thing like that. So I waited for him. I remember that it was so hot that my shoes melted a little into the tar on the road. It just got hotter and hotter, but I didn’t want to get up, cuz then the monster would come and get me, you know?”

“Yeah,” Dean says. “I know the feeling.”

“He never came out,” Victor says. He stares out over the room, seeing nothing. He can still smell the melted rubber, feel the particular weight of his soles peeling off the tar. “He just never came back out. I waited for three hours until the owner of the store noticed me out there and came out to see what was wrong. He never even saw Anthony come in.”

Dean is silent. He takes the cigarette back from Victor and sits up, hunting for an ashtray. It’s over on the table, and he has to get up to stub the cigarette out. He sits on the edge of the bed when he comes back, watching Victor closely. “Come here,” Victor says, and Dean does.

“They found Anthony six weeks later,” Victor says into Dean’s hair. It smells like gel and shampoo and smoke. “In a clearing a few miles away from our home. He’d been moved there post-mortem.” He hesitates. The words crowd up in his throat and he makes himself say each one. “The animals had destroyed most of the, most of the body. There wasn’t all that much left, just enough to tell that he’d only been dead about a week. That they’d kept him alive for. For – for five weeks. When I joined the Bureau I looked up his file. They never even had any suspects.”

“You joined cuz of your brother,” Dean says.

Victor smiles tightly. “Course I did. I wanted to fight monsters.”

“I wondered,” Dean says slowly. “You always – I mean, every time we ran into you, you said a lot of stuff about …” He trails off uncertainly. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, well,” Victor says, his eyes slipping closed. “Everyone’s got a sob story.”

He feels Dean shift, roll up on his elbows so they’re chest to chest. Victor’s hands are lax and open on the pillow above his head. Dean presses a kiss to Victor’s forehead, to the corner of each eye, to Victor’s mouth. He doesn’t say anything, and when Victor slides into sleep it’s painless and quiet, Dean wrapped around him, keeping the world away.

-

 

He hears plates clattering. Voices. The hiss and bubble of a deep fryer. He looks up and she has her notepad out, pen tapping onto it like she’d rather be anywhere else than here. “You really,” Coyote says, “oughta try the French toast. It’s fantastic. Isn’t it, Sally?”

Sally pops her gum and offers him a bleak, dead-eyed smile. “Sure is, mister. You want me to come back when you’re ready?”

“Um,” Victor says. “French toast is fine.”

Coyote pushes a cup of coffee across the table at him. “You can leave the bottle,” he tells Sally as she goes to walk away. “I think my friend here’s gonna need it.” She rolls her eyes and sets the carafe of coffee on the table. It’s as she’s walking away that Victor realizes she’s dead, the backs of her legs criss-crossed with open sores, a chunk of her thigh taken out right where the hem of her uniform hits. Out the window is a wasteland of dust and unending sky.

“Where the fuck am I?” Victor asks, low. His fingers curl around the coffee cup, ready to smash it into Coyote’s smug, round face.

Coyote shrugs. “Thought you’d appreciate the local color. Look, I’m not here to fuck around with you, I promise. If you’re not comfortable –” He waves a hand and the diner dissolves. They’re in the D.C. office, the office he hardly ever saw. Coyote leaning back in Reidy’s chair, his feet kicked up on the desk. Victor looks at his own desk, looks up in time to watch Sally slam a plate of French toast in front of him.

“Dig in,” Coyote offers.

“I don’t want to be here either,” Victor says quietly. “Get the fuck out of my partner’s chair. Get the fuck out of my head.”

Coyote sighs. “Oh, fine. Be a party pooper.”

The office is gone in a blink of an eye. Victor is sitting a few feet away from an enormous fire. The smoke smells of clean, sweet herbs. The plate of French toast is in front of Victor’s crossed legs. The cup of coffee is by his knee. Victor picks up the cup and sniffs at it. Plain old diner coffee.

He looks around himself; he’s sitting in a clearing surrounded by tall rocks and red earth. The air is as dry as bleached bones. It’s nighttime, and it’s cold. Victor takes a bite of the French toast. As promised, it’s delicious.

“Why did you save me?” Victor asks. Coyote is laying on his back, looking up at the stars.

“I didn’t,” Coyote says. “You like the blueberries in that French toast? That’s what makes it extra special.”

Victor finds himself taking another bite, and then another. The taste of the berries mingles with the smoke. He sets the plate down and walks over to Coyote’s side, dropping to his knees in the dust. Coyote looks up at him with bright, curious eyes.

“Why did you do that to Sam Winchester?”

“Do what?” Coyote asks. “I tell you, that kid has no sense of humor. Or perspective, but I guess that’s kind of a given with those Winchesters, ain’t it?”

The firelight flickers over his cheekbones, hollowing them out, sharpening his nose. He shifts up and matches Victor’s posture, legs crossed, elbows resting on his knees. “Look,” he says, “if you really want to know, I’ll tell you, but it’s not gonna make a lick of sense.”

Victor waits. Coyote sighs. “I swear, it’s like a disease with you people. You just can’t leave well enough alone. I was curious, okay? I wanted to see what Sam would do, without his brother. And I wanted to see what _they_ would do. Sam and Dean, they’re pretty major players, you know? I dipped my toe in the water and neither side said a damn word. I wanted to know if I was _safe_.”

Victor traces circles in the dirt. “You’re right,” he admits. “That doesn’t make much sense.”

“Told you,” Coyote tells him. “But you’re not the kind of person who can just sit back and eat his breakfast. That’s why I like you. I think you’ll do well.”

“In what?” Victor asks. He’s almost too afraid to ask.

“There’s a war coming,” Coyote says. He reaches over and lays his fingers over the circles at Victor’s feet. Victor can feel the earth shake underneath him for just a second and then it’s gone. He can feel the tremors in his bones, like he’s bracing for the aftershock.

“It’s been a long time since anybody sang my songs,” Coyote says sadly. “Long, long time. Sure, every once in a while I’ll get a pyre, some kind of offering, but no one tells Old Coyote’s stories anymore. Only hunters, who think that knowledge is power – the more who know about me, the easier it’d be to stop me, you know what I mean?”

“Are you,” Victor says, and licks his lips. “Are you really a god?” He should feel humbled, he thinks. He stares at Coyote and sees soft skin and wide open eyes. He doesn’t look like a god. He looks like a janitor, like somebody’s assistant.

“You’re not asking the right questions,” Coyote says, a crooked smile on his face.

“Why did you save me?” Victor asks, and Coyote shakes his head.

“I already told you. I didn’t.”

“You did,” Victor insists, “You came for me at my house, you saved me from the demons.”

“Oh,” Coyote says. “That. I thought you meant before.”

Victor is still and silent. “You were in the hospital,” he says slowly.

“Yeah,” Coyote says, “but I wasn’t at the police station. Whoa boy, no fucking way. She’s not a bitch to tangle with, I’ll tell you what.”

Victor looks up to the sky. The darkness is an enormous bowl of stars above his head, clustered thick and unsettlingly close. He’s never seen so many stars in his life. The fire smells of good meat and lays shadows on the ground, stretching long fingers toward where he sits with Coyote. Victor watches them flicker, waiting to catch a glimpse of the real world. He gropes for the right questions.

“What do you want from me?” he asks.

Coyote grins broadly. “Better! You’re a quick learner. I want someone on my side. You seemed uniquely suited. The white hats and black hats picked their champions ages ago, but I’m a spur of the moment kind of guy, you know?”  
  
“What is your side?”

The grin widens even further. Coyote rolls his eyes towards the heavens, considering. “When man was made out of clay and lived in fear of the gods,” he says, after a long while, “Prometheus took pity and brought them fire. And ever after, you guys have been _so_ much more fun. Sometimes I win, sometimes you win, we all go home happy. But that’s not what the generalissimos have in mind, it’s go large or go home, end of the world sort of thing. That’s not what I want.”

“What am I supposed to do?” The fire creeps closer. Coyote doesn’t even seem to notice, pulling up handfuls of dirt and letting it run through his fingers. The whole world trembles, waiting for Coyote’s answer.

“Nothing special,” Coyote says. “Do that voodoo that you do. It’ll work out. That’s the best part, man – you just toss in that monkey wrench and let the machine do its job. But that’s not the right question. And you know it.”

Victor is quiet for a long time. Coyote leans back on his hands. They twitch at his sides, like he wants to be up on his feet and dancing in the fire. “Why,” Victor says. He hesitates. He’s not sure he really wants to know. “Why me? Why did you pick me? Why did I – why did I survive?”

Coyote’s eyes crease in the barest hint of a smile. “Now you’re getting it. I didn’t pick you. There’s no greater purpose, nothing watching out for you. Nothing but random chaos that took your brother, scooped out your mother’s brains like rotted fruit, put you smack in the path of the biggest fiend to walk the earth in a thousand years. And nothing saved you. Think of it like a, you know, a happy accident.” He grins broadly, waves his hands like Bob Fosse.

Victor stares at his hands, at the fire. He can’t really deny it. He feels the truth of it in his bones, that dead certainty.

“There’s no future for you except what you’re going to make yourself,” Coyote says. “That’s why I picked you. You’re going to remake the world.”

-

 

The bed next to him is still warm. He surfaces slowly, taking easy, animal comfort in the sound of Dean’s voice. There’s a stretch of sunlight on the other pillow, reaching all the way across the floor. A shadow crosses in front of it and Victor flinches as it moves away, pouring light back onto his face.

Dean looks over his shoulder, hesitates. “Call you back,” he says, and snaps the phone closed. The bed dips when he sits down, and gravity rolls Victor closer.

“Hey,” Dean says. The sunlight makes him look pinched and tired. It lights up every wrinkle around his eyes, every hair on his chin and cheeks. “Hey, go back to sleep.”

“You leaving?” Victor asks. He arches his back. Dean traces two fingers over the curve of Victor’s ear, down the line of his throat. It takes Dean a long time to reply, long enough that Victor opens his eyes again, focuses blearily on Dean’s face. Dean rubs his thumb over Victor’s bottom lip. He clears his throat.

“Yeah,” Dean says. “I gotta – Sam needs me. It’s a weird, it’s this thing –”

Victor opens his mouth, sucks Dean’s thumb in and rolls his tongue against the broad, calloused pad. “Oh,” Dean says, surprised, and then shakes himself. He pulls back and Victor lets him go, leans into the touch as Dean strokes the backs of his fingers over Victor’s cheek.

“I’m sorry I have to go,” Dean says hesitantly. “I don’t want to. I didn’t think it would be like this.”

“Don’t go, then,” Victor says, simple, like he can’t see the look on Dean’s face that says it’s anything but. He hears an echo in his mind – _you’re going to remake the world_ – and he thinks of fire, of heat and clean smoke.

“I have to,” Dean says, and smiles. “I’ll – I’ll be back soon. Look, why don’t you give Bobby a call, tell him about the zombies. That was pretty weird, he’ll wanna hear about it. I put a bunch of numbers into your phone. I’ll be back soon.”

Victor looks at Dean for a long time. Dean tries to smile again, but it slips off his face quickly. He takes Dean’s hand, wraps his fingers around Dean’s and rubs his thumb against the hard center of Dean’s palm. Dean glances down, watches him do it. There’s something in his eyes that Victor can’t place. “Hey,” Dean says. “Hey, um. Thanks for letting me be myself, these last couple weeks. It was awesome.”

“What’s going on?” Victor asks. “There’s something wrong, isn’t there?”

Dean tucks his lower lip between his teeth and drops his gaze, but when he looks up his eyes are clear. “No,” he says. “This should’ve happened years ago. It’s okay, Victor. Everything’s fine. I’ll be back tomorrow, okay? You get some rest.” He squeezes Victor’s hand and then lets it go. Places a kiss on Victor’s forehead, tilts his chin up to kiss him on the mouth. He smells like leather and warm skin and before he pulls back he kisses Victor quickly, one last time.

“See you on the flip side,” Dean says, and this time his grin almost looks real. He doesn’t look back as he shuts the door behind himself.

The room falls quiet. Victor stares up at the ceiling and wonders if he should go after Dean. He hears the deep rumble of the Chevy’s engine, the thump of rock music. And then silence. Victor rolls onto his side, tucks his elbow underneath his body, contemplates the wall. It’s easier than he thought it would be to fall back asleep.

Victor drifts. The sun rises and becomes early afternoon before his stomach forces him out of bed. He wanders the hotel room naked, fingernails scratching at his stomach, wondering if Dean is really going to come back. He flips his phone open, discovers that his address book has multiplied in his sleep. He recognizes only a quarter of the names. He eats two snack bars out of the duffle that holds his new clothes – bought on Dean’s dollar, winnings from a pool tournament. It’s barely half full. There doesn’t seem to be any reason to stay awake, so he doesn’t.

He wakes up again in late afternoon, calls Bobby Singer. There’s no answer, so he leaves a message advising zombie hordes. He notices that Dean has left his laptop behind, and decides that Dean is coming back. There are three tabs of porn and twelve tabs of mysterious articles, from local rags in the neighboring states. Victor reads through two of them and starts making notes on the third without really thinking about it, scrounging through the desk for the motel notepaper.

He stumbles when he stands up from the table and has to put a hand down to catch himself. He’s dizzy – he feels drunk. He goes back to bed and pulls the covers over his head. The material is scratchy on his cheeks. He can still see light through the blanket.

It’s like he’s taken a deep breath and is waiting to let it out, waiting for things to make sense again. As if each new revelation has been built on the horror of the last. He thought that he could look evil in the face and maybe he can, but random, purposeless chaos is a brand fucking new idea. A happy accident, he thinks, and feels something loosen in his chest. It’s almost a comfort.

When he wakes up, it’s not quite morning. The sunlight through the window is as weak as gas station coffee and Victor pours himself into the bathroom, resting his forehead against the wall as the shower heats up.

Their room is at the end of a long row, and the shower’s got a tiny window, almost above Victor’s head. There’s no shampoo, only a bar of something labeled Face Soap that smells like nothing at all, but Victor makes do. He lathers up his whole body, curls of white foam almost achingly bright against his skin. He passes a hand over his arm, wiping them away. Stares at the sunlight on his skin, picking out a strand of hair here and there, and for the first time in a long, long while, feels some sort of recognition.

He doesn’t notice the first few drops of rain. They hit the window with a dull sort of sound that he barely hears and doesn’t pay any attention to. The soap sluicing off of his arm turns red, and he stares at it for a long moment, watches white suds slide off and land on the tub, before looking up. There’s blood on the window.

It takes him a while before he starts to believe what he’s seeing. Each drop has a spray of smaller drops around it. Here and there are traces that have slid down the window, leaving behind some kind of unidentifiable chunks, meat or brains or clotting. He backs up and his calves hit the edge of the tub. He shuts off the water without looking behind him, without even looking down to see if he’s missed any soap. He doesn’t look behind himself as he dries off. The room is quiet enough that he can hear rain hitting the motel roof.

The room is streaked with red. It looks like a stained glass window, striping the carpet and the beds and the walls. The window is covered in so much blood that Victor can’t see through it. It’s raining harder now and he dresses quickly. He drops his pants twice before he can pull them up, his fingers fumbling over the zipper. He looks around the room – Dean left his duffel bag tucked almost underneath the dresser and even now it makes Victor hesitate uncertainly, seeing it left behind. But he can see the handle of a machete tucked into the bag and that’s better than nothing.

He can’t hear anything except for the sound of the rain, thudding heavy as hail above him. He hefts the machete in one hand, digs blindly for some other weapon, pulls out an ancient revolver with a pentagram etched into the handle. There’s salt ground into the windowsill. He watched Dean shake out dark powder in a line across the doorway. He saw it with his own eyes, he saw frustrated demons pacing outside the police station, and tries to believe that these things will protect him.

He waits long enough that his muscles start to scream with tension, adrenaline like acid poured over his bones. He shifts to the bed, sits stiffly on the edge. The rain is tapering off. Then, eventually, silence.

Victor eases up off of the bed. His thumb twitches on the hammer of the gun. He slides one foot forward. He can’t hear anything. He sets the blade down long enough to dig the flask out of Dean’s bag – the holy water – then digs out the other one and takes a long swallow of whiskey. It helps, a little bit.

His fingers wrap around the doorknob. He turns it and his heart thuds painfully in his chest twice before he can force himself to actually open the door.

The smell is what hits him first. He’s back in the police station again, watching that little girl paint the walls, listening to three people gasp wetly behind him, strewn carelessly on the floor like toys. The air is hot and as soon as he breathes in his lungs fill with copper. He chokes and spins back into the room, dropping the machete as his knees hit the carpet. There’s a long moment where his back is to the door and anything in the world could come through it, but nothing does. He gets back up on his feet. The ground – the cars – everything is coated and streaked in blood. Broken glass crunches under his feet. There’s a dead body in the parking lot.

He tucks the revolver into the back of his jeans, inches along the walkway, a T-shirt tied around his face, bandit-style. The walkway is covered and the only blood is splatter from the parking lot. He knocks on his neighbor’s doors, listens closely. “Hello?” he calls. “Is anybody still here?”

The body in the parking lot is a woman. There’s not a speck of blood on her. She’s barely twenty feet from the motel. Her whole body is pointed at Victor’s door. She’s too still to be anything but dead, but he reaches for her anyway, turns her over by the shoulder. He’s flinching back even before he sees the seared meat that used to be her face. Before he even really registers the black, burnt holes where her eyes used to be. Her hair spreads out in a corona around her face. He can’t even tell what she used to look like.

There’s nobody else. He checks every room, the front desk and finally paces back around to her. He makes himself look at her while he fishes the car keys out of the front pocket of her jeans. After that, it’s easy to check cars, his fingers sliding greasily over the metal. He gags – more reflex than anything – but strikes lucky on the third try, an old Pontiac Sunbird. He locks the car back up carefully and goes back to the motel room. He packs his duffel and Dean’s mechanically, throws the laptop into the case and carries everything out on one trip. It’s only when the car doors are locked that he pulls the T-shirt down over his nose and pulls his cell phone out of his pocket.

“Come on, come on,” he chants under his breath. The phone rings twice and voicemail picks up.

_This is Dean Winchester. If you’re in trouble, go to these coordinates. 43.4916. -96.7592. Ask for Bobby Singer and Sam Winchester. They’ll help._

Beep. Victor takes the phone away from his ear and stares at it in disbelief. He calls again. No answer. He scrolls through his phone book for Sam’s number. No answer there either. No answer for Singer. Ellen’s number has been disconnected.

Victor looks over his shoulder. He can barely see the woman through the blood smeared glass of his back mirror. She’s close enough to the car that he thinks he’ll have to back up over her to get out. He drives through the hedge in front of him instead.

He points the car towards South Dakota and drives. The whole world looks like a slaughterhouse. He sees dead bodies, cars and buildings and people on fire. Nobody comes to help them. The radio is nothing but static and the road is as slippery as if he was driving in a storm. The smell is so bad that he keeps the T-shirt tied over his mouth as he drives.

He stops three hours in. A nothing gas station by the side of the road, the only thing he’s seen for miles. He has to smash a window to get in. The alarm goes off and he looks over his shoulders, hoping for some kind of response. He’s called Dean at least twenty times. Nothing. He called his father, no response there either. He’s driving blind into a bloody wasteland.

He grabs bags of energy bars and a whole case of water, bags of coffee, toilet paper. He’s heading back for all the maps that they stock when he hears a small, thin sound. There’s a girl behind the counter, whimpering. She scrambles further back when she realizes he’s heard her; her tennis shoes scuffle almost soundlessly on the tile.

“It’s okay,” Victor says softly. She freezes. He can see her fingertips over the counter. He puts a hand on the revolver tucked into his waistband. “You’re all right. I’m not here to hurt you. Come on out, honey.”

“ _No_ ,” she says. Her voice is disconcertingly light; she’s probably still in high school. “You’re one of them.”

“Who?” he asks. Creeps closer soundlessly. She hesitates – probably still thinks the words sound crazy even though the eaves out there are still dripping clotting blood – and he’s over the counter in a second, his belly digging into the edge, dragging her out screaming and kicking at him.

“You’re okay, you’re okay,” he chants, and lets her go. She backs into a display of potato chips trying to get away from him and they spill onto the ground together. Victor steps forward and she scrambles backwards.

“Stay away from me,” she hisses. She’s still got her uniform on, a dismal polyester top, a nametag pinned to the breast. Victor puts his hands up.

“You really wanna stay here?” he asks. She says nothing, so he hunkers down. Doesn’t try to approach any closer. “My name’s Victor. What’s yours?”

“You’re that FBI guy,” she says, her eyes wide. “I saw you on TV. I thought you were dead.”

“No,” Victor says. “No, I got lucky.”

She watches him for a long second before she pulls herself to her feet. He stays where he is, looking up at her. “Maria,” she says. “It’s Maria.”

“Maria,” Victor repeats. “Nice to meet you. You know what happened here?”

She shakes her head, wrapping her arms around herself. “After – after the rain stopped – I saw the black smoke. I thought – I – I called the cops but nobody came – I thought it was the end of the world.”

She flinches again when he stands up, so he lets her cry it out, gathering up his maps and stuffing his pockets full of lighters. “I’m going to South Dakota,” he says over his shoulder. “There are people there who can help.”

“What about my family?” she asks, sniffling.

  



	5. Chapter 5

  


Her family is gone. Her house deserted. But the two neighbor boys are hiding in the backyard shed, and they come running when they hear Maria’s voice. An old man is sitting on his front porch in the next town over, his hands covered in blood. Maria took a swig of holy water before he let her in the car and he gives each new survivor the same. They find a second car, and more people.

By the time they stop for the night there are three cars and seventeen souls trailing after him towards the promise of South Dakota. They keep in touch with walkie talkies salvaged from the camping store the next town over from where he picked Maria up. She’s riding with him in the Pontiac, the two neighbor boys squished in the back seat with the case of water and warm blankets. Victor takes a knife to each car, tracing lines from Dean’s journal that will keep the demons out. The caravan shuffles positions and a third little boy joins the two in Victor’s backseat. Maria stays close by him. Nobody wants to eat outside of the safety of the cars. Afterwards, Victor walks all of the children to the rest stop bathroom before shepherding them back to each car for the night.

His leadership is more muscle memory than anything else. When he returns the children to their respective guardians, each window is full of people staring at him like he knows what he’s talking about, like he’d be able to do fucking anything for them if a demon came. He turns away, his heart stuttering in his chest. He doesn’t know if Singer’s house will still be standing, if Dean and Sam will even be there and not on the road or protecting their own survivors.

He walks back to the Pontiac slowly. His body feels stiff from being in the car all day. The three boys are already asleep, just the tops of their heads visible underneath the blankets. One of them is sleeping halfway up on the mostly empty case of water bottles, and Victor wishes that he had thought to move it. Maria is curled against the passenger door, another blanket wrapped around her thin shoulders. He hasn’t even asked her how old she is, if she had siblings, where she went to school. She screamed twice when she found the house empty of everything except a smear of blood that led all the way from the top of the stairs out the front door, and hasn’t said much since.

Victor eases himself in behind the wheel. He made himself the worst cup of coffee in existence, waiting for the kids to finish, getting the water as hot as it could go and mixing in some instant coffee from the gas station. Maria turns her head towards him.

“Hi,” she says thickly. Her long hair is spread across her face. Victor probably woke her up.

“Hey,” he replies. “How’re you feeling?”

She mumbles something unintelligible in response, rubbing her hands over her face. Her wrists are thin and bony. She stares into the darkness outside the car like she’ll be able to see anything. “What’s happening to us?” she asks softly.

Victor stares into his coffee. The travel mug was in the back seat of the car; it must have belonged to the dead woman. “I think you were right,” he says. “I think it’s the end of the world.”

“How do you know?” Her voice gets smaller and smaller.

“What else could it be?”

She’s quiet for a long time. Then, “Are we going to die?”

“No,” Victor says. He turns towards her. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you. I promise.”

 

-

 

When he wakes up, it’s dark. Maria is a warm, heavy weight on his chest. He fumbles in his jacket pocket for his cell phone; it’s tough to do it without waking her up, and she grumbles a little. Her hands, fisted in the front of his jacket, look as small as a child’s. Maybe he should let her sleep for a while longer, he thinks; but she can sleep on the road. He’s wide awake, his whole body humming. He feels like he’s slept for twelve hours.

He maneuvers the cell phone up to his face and squints at it. And then frowns. He hits a few buttons on the face of it, presses the red button a few times. Maybe it’s stuck. No matter how many times he does it, the numbers still say that it’s 9:48am.

He straightens slowly, easing Maria away. It’s darker outside than when he went to sleep. The slam of the car door echoes out into the blackness. He puts his hands out; his fingertips are hazy. He can barely see the other two cars. He makes his way hand over hand towards the bumper. When he gets out there he keeps both hands on the truck and kicks out with one foot. On the third try, some heads pop up inside the car.

The old woman – Theresa, Victor thinks, her name is Theresa and that’s her grandchild in my back seat - rolls down the window. “Mr. Henriksen?” she asks, and Victor can’t think of anything to say, anything to explain or reassure. The world has gone dark.

“Oh my god, it’s _mid-morning_ ,” someone says from the back seat. “Where’s the _sun_?”

Bruised, exhausted eyes turn towards him. Behind them, he can see the bumper of the rear car. They turn on their headlights – a sign of life as good as any, he guesses – and he winces, shades his face with his hand. The lights throw his shadow out into the darkness.

“Come on,” Victor says. “Let’s hit the road.”

Victor’s caravan crowds together nervously on the road. The lights shining hard and too close in Victor’s rearview mirror bring his shoulders up tightly, just waiting for one of them to rear-end him. But he can’t blame them, not really; the blackness is as thick and heavy as the worst kind of fog, and it reflects the headlights back at him. He drives on the Braille line just to convince himself that they’re moving at all. The clock on the dashboard ticks hours by and it never gets lighter.

Morning comes and goes and brings no light. Every few hours, the radio crackles and asks for bathroom breaks, for help. They’re terrified. The boys sit quietly in the backseat. Maria holds onto the walkie talkie like it’s a direct line to God. Every time the car hits something in the dark she gets a little smaller.

It takes them three days to get to South Dakota.

The morning of the third day, the darkness vanishes. Victor wakes early with the door open and cold air leaking in on his face, Maria curled against the car with her knees pulled up to her chest. She’s weeping in the grey, dull light. He scoots over to her side of the car and she grabs blindly for his hand. They watch the sun rise over a scorched earth.

They’re only two hundred miles out that day and the anticipation is painful. They pass the ruins of towns, people sitting in the rubble just watching the fires burn. “Should we stop?” Maria whispers, and Victor shakes his head.

“Can I get the radio?” he asks. “Thanks. Hey, Charlie?”

The walkie talkie crackles. “Yeah?”

“Can you break off and go talk to those people, see who needs help? You know where we’re going, right?”

“Yep, we got it. We’re full up, though – can’t take any more passengers.”

“That’s okay,” Victor says. “Let ‘em know where we’re heading and why. If they want to come along, it’s up to them.”

The last car peels away from the group. The town fades into the distance. The relief of seeing other people is almost palpable in the group – Maria and Steve talk it over for the next hour. They’re not the only ones left. It occurs to Victor that he never even considered that they were – never even stopped to think that the Winchesters would be gone. He reaches under his collar to touch the charm there, still hanging on its thin cord. He hasn’t taken it off since the hospital.

The first thing he’s going to do is punch Dean Winchester in the face for leaving him in that hotel room a day before the apocalypse. The second thing he’ll do is, of course, the obvious one.

“You’re smiling,” Maria says.

“Yeah, well,” Victor says. “Life’s funny that way.”

 

-

 

Passing under the big sign for Singer Salvage Yard is like entering the Emerald City. Everybody is tense, twitching with anticipation. The place doesn’t look like much, never has – just an old house with peeling paint and junked up cars surrounding it like a medieval wall. The sun is still high in the sky and the air is hot and still. Summer has come early to Bobby Singer’s home. There are more cars in the front of the house, cars that actually look drivable, and tucked in with them – Victor’s heart squeezes tight when he sees it – is that big black monster of Dean Winchester’s. For as long as he looked for that car, he’s never been so glad to see it.

The kids stick close to Victor. Maria sticks closer than anybody. Victor’s boots thump hollowly on the dry wood of the porch. He’s going to punch Dean Winchester, kiss him like a movie heroine, and then they’re going to save the world.

It’s Singer who opens the door, and for a long time he just stares at Victor. “Well,” he says, his voice raw. “Guess you’d better come in.”

He stands back to let Victor’s group file in. There are people there already – dusty, bloody, travel-worn people, in suits and pajamas and uniforms. They’re perched on stairs and cross-legged on the floor. There’s an infant sleeping in an enormous metal bowl that might’ve had a previous life as a mixing bowl or the center piece of some kind of ritual, before it was stuffed full of old clothes and used as a bassinette. Sam Winchester is sitting alone at the kitchen table, a bottle in his hands. He looks up when Victor comes in.

Victor glances around the kitchen. Looks over his shoulder. His people are slowly dissolving into the huddled masses, being taken into this group or that. A black girl with a London accent has brought Maria to a free space and is sitting with her. He doesn’t see Dean anywhere.

He turns back to Sam, who’s still watching Victor, something unreadable in his eyes. “Where – ?” Victor opens his mouth to ask and Sam cuts him off.

“Dean’s dead.”

There’s a long moment of silence that rings in Victor’s ears. He opens and closes his hands, wiping them on the palm of his pants. “What?” he manages. His mouth is almost too dry to speak.

Sam drinks from the bottle. Something amber colored. The bottle is plastic. “Dean is dead,” he says. Slow and measured. The fingers of his other hand are splayed wide on the table top, perfectly still. “He made a deal. It came due.”

Victor takes a step towards the table, but his legs give out from under him like he had his strings cut, and when he falls onto his knees in the middle of Bobby Singer’s kitchen, Sam just looks at him. He doesn’t say anything. It makes sense – Dean’s dead, and there’s nothing else to say.

 

-

 

Victor is six steps up, and he’s frozen on the seventh. There must have been a moment where he let himself think about putting one foot in front of the other instead of just fucking doing it. His right foot is on the seventh step – his left is as stuck as if someone nailed him to the floor.

There’s a thickness to the air that Victor knows – a smell that he has found in alleyways and basements, in abandoned places where Death has come and stayed for a while. It’s hot in the house. Too hot to keep a body where the sun lays cheerful squares on the wooden floors. It’s been four days.

Victor drags his left foot up onto the seventh step. His whole body feels numb and cold all over. His shoulders ache. The smell gets worse the higher he goes. It’s not a rotten smell – he remembers a house in the country that smelled of sweet grass until you went upstairs, where a body had liquefied slowly in the bathtub. He remembers the suicide of a man who hung forgotten in the rafters until the flesh melted off his body in long strips, looking like so much spaghetti. He remembers the smell of the funeral home after Anthony’s body was found, nothing but chemicals and underneath, the faintest trace of old leaves.

They’ve laid Dean in the same bedroom that Victor spent the night with him. It’s the second one on the left, right across from a bathroom that Victor never used. The door is open.

Bobby Singer is hunched over on the old three-legged stool that had been in the corner, his elbows resting on his knees. Victor can’t see his face. It’s easier looking at the shaggy curve of his cheek than at Dean, who doesn’t look at all like he’s sleeping. Dean is pale and bloodless and obviously, clearly, horribly not alive. He’s covered to his chin with a blanket – the same blanket that Victor slept under, that Dean slept under, both of them naked and sweating.

“Come in or don’t,” Singer says. “Don’t just stand there with your thumb up your butt.”

Victor comes in. He stands awkwardly just inside the door. _This isn’t_ , Dean had said, _a good idea_. There’s sunlight on Dean’s face. It’s shocking, how much this hurts. Months of dull, unrelenting grief and there’s still a heart inside of him to break.

“What –” Victor says, haltingly. “Was it -?”

“Boy wasn’t born with a lick of sense in him,” Singer mutters. “Not a goddamn lick o’ sense. Too much heart by half and it’s all his daddy’s fault, every goddamn bit of it.”

“What happened?” Victor asks, and Singer glances over his shoulder, like he’d already forgotten Victor was there.

“Dean,” Singer says, “he traded his life for Sam’s. They gave ‘im a year for it. A _year_. Stupid fool.”

Singer _has_ forgotten, Victor thinks. Maybe he’s forgotten that it’s Victor Henriksen standing here, maybe he’s just talking to Dean. Singer is silent for a long time. All that Victor can see is the rounded edges of his bones. “I never loved John half s’much as I loved his boys,” Singer says, and that’s when he breaks down and starts crying. It’s silent, shoulders shaking, his whole body quaking under it. He doesn’t even bother to hide his face.

Victor moves forward half a step. Then another. It’s hard to reach out. He remembers the first time that he met Bobby Singer, magnificent in his redneck stubbornness, his hand halfway to his shotgun even before he opened his door to two government agents. Under his palm, Bobby’s shoulder is as hard as stone. And when Bobby grabs for Victor’s hand, it’s just as hard not to pull away, to flinch back, but he lets Bobby grip his fingers tight enough to hurt.

“I’m,” Bobby says, “I think I’m gonna sit with him awhile, son.” Victor nods even though Bobby can’t see him do it, hunched over in his chair. When Bobby lets him go he slides his hand over Bobby’s shoulder, gives him an awkward pat before fleeing.

He stumbles on the stairs. Makes it through the hallway and the living room and all those refugees camping out in Bobby’s living room, bangs a hip hard into the doorway and makes it outside just quickly enough to vomit his meager, pathetic breakfast onto the bare earth next to the porch. Victor wipes his mouth on the sleeve of his jacket and tries to steady his breathing.

“You want some of this?”

Victor turns. Sam is leaning over the porch railing, elbows balanced, long legs stretched out behind him. He sloshes the bottle in his hand, pointed at Victor. Glass this time. He’s moving up in the world. There’s not a whole lot left inside. Victor takes it. It burns going down. When he wipes his mouth again on his sleeve he can smell vomit.

“Sam,” Victor says. “Sam, I’m – ”

“I know,” Sam says. “It’s pretty bad up there. The hellhounds tore him right open. I thought – I thought right to the end of it that I was gonna save him. But I couldn’t. I wasn’t strong enough then. But I will be.”

Victor stares up at Sam, who takes the bottle back and empties it down his throat. He throws it away into the tall grass. It hits something, a stone or a fender or god knows what, and shatters. “Bobby wants to burn him,” Sam says. “But Dean’s gonna need his body when I get him back.”

The screen door bangs behind him, and Victor stares at the spot where Sam Winchester used to be, unable to look away.

It’s getting dark outside. Victor sits heavily on the bottom step of the porch. He can hear voices behind him, pots and pans banging. He should have figured that Bobby Singer would be fully stocked for the apocalypse. He’s hungry, but he can’t go back inside just yet. Even the idea of it makes him sick. He lets the wind blow over his face. There are shadows stretching long towards the horizon. He closes his eyes, and when he opens them there’s a man in a long coat standing out in the middle of the field, staring up at Bobby’s house. There’s a long moment where Victor only looks at him, wondering where the fuck he’s come from, why he’s not inside the house where it’s safe. Then it all clicks and he remembers the hospital, the passenger seat of Dean’s car, brushing up against a tan trench coat on his way into Ellen’s roadhouse, hardly noticing long enough to say he was sorry. He knows this man.

“You,” Victor breathes.

The man turns towards him. He’s an ordinary-looking man – almost as ordinary as Coyote. Before this life, before Colorado, Victor might have summed him up as a tax accountant or a door-to-door Bible thumper. Ugly Sears trench coat, tie still around his neck even though it’s the end of the world. But it’s the unending blue of his eyes that stop Victor cold and fearful ten paces away, his fists in front of him like it’ll do some good against whatever’s wearing this man’s body. It’s not human. If it’s a demon they’re all dead.

“Victor,” the man greets him, almost personably. “How are you.”

Victor pulls the gun out of his waistband. It hasn’t left his side since the motel. It’s a terrible thing to carry around him, long and heavy, but it feels right in his hand. He can feel that scratched out pentagram against his palm. He thumbs the hammer back. The man smiles thinly.

“No,” he says. “That won’t help.”

He spreads his hands, and Victor reacts. The gun is impossibly loud and in the long stillness that follows, nothing happens. No reaction from inside the house, just laughter soft through the open windows. They haven’t heard anything. Victor doesn’t lower the gun or look away from the man, who is staring down at the smoking hole in the front of his jacket. The man lifts his eyes and looks at Victor. The rustling of wings is loud and terrifying. Victor flinches - and when he opens his eyes the man is standing too close to him, peering up into his face.

“Be not afraid,” the man says.

The gun drops out of Victor’s cold hands, and he stumbles backwards. The man looks at him. “What the hell are you?” Victor breathes.

“Castiel,” the man answers. “I’m an angel of the Lord.”

For a brief, hot second Victor remembers prayer, remembers Josiah bringing him each week to Mass. Maybe they’d all gone as a family, before Anthony disappeared, before their mother lost her mind, but if they did Victor was too young to remember and church has always been the smell of his father’s cologne mixing with the incense. He remembers believing in angels so much more than he ever believed in devils.

“You,” Victor whispers. “You were with Dean all along. You told him what Sam was doing with the demon.”

The angel inclines his head. “Dean is – very important. I’m sure you’ve seen that there are many … pivotal events playing out.”

“Dean is _dead_ ,” Victor says. “How can you say he’s important? If he was so important, why didn’t you _save him_?”

The angel’s face creases in exasperation. Victor can barely think of him by name, can barely think of anything over the frantic thump of his heartbeat. “I wasn’t there to perch on his shoulder,” Castiel says. “I’m a soldier. It wasn’t my place to interfere.”

“But you’re here,” Victor says, and Castiel looks away.  
  
“I,” Castiel says, and then shakes his head, like he’s changed his mind about whatever he was going to say. “It was necessary,” he says instead. “There’s a bigger picture going on here. I don’t expect you to understand.”

“I don’t,” Victor says. He spreads his hands, steps away from Castiel. “I don’t understand any of this. Three months ago, I was with the FBI, hunting down Dean Winchester because I thought he was the embodiment of everything that could go wrong in the world that I lived in. There’s a lot that I don’t _understand_.”

Castiel just looks at him, completely expressionless, like he’s just waiting for Victor to do something else. “Why are you here?” Victor asks again, suddenly exhausted. “Dean’s dead. Look around you, there are so many people that need help right now.”

Castiel trains his eyes up to the sky, but only for a second before he looks back down at the ground. When he speaks, Victor could almost swear that he’s embarrassed. “This is where I need to be,” he says. “This was the job that God gave me.”

“To watch over Dean,” Victor says. “Even now. To watch over him, but not to save him.”

“Yes,” Castiel says miserably.

Victor sways on his feet. He rubs both hands over his face, turns and picks up the gun from the grass. He feels better with something in his hands, something to look at other than that unfathomable blue. “It’s the end of everything,” he says, and Castiel shakes his head.

“It’s only the beginning.”

Victor jerks his head up. “How?” he asks in disbelief. “How is this the beginning of anything? The whole world is over, it’s gone.”

“Only as you know it,” Castiel says. “The war has started.”

Victor thinks of clean smoke and good meat, of soft, open eyes telling him that it was _go big or go home_ , that a storm was coming. “What war?” he asks. Castiel says nothing. “Between – ”

“Yes,” Castiel says, and the world reels underneath Victor’s feet. He stumbles, his chest squeezing tight; the sky has opened up above his head and for a second he thinks he’ll fall again, helpless in front of this creature, this being that he used to believe in. He can’t believe he didn’t see it before.

“How many people have died already?” he gasps. Castiel’s mouth draws thin, the corners turning down unhappily. “For what?”

“It’s God’s will. I don’t expect you to understand,” Castiel says again.

For a second, Victor thinks he’s going to throw up, but when he opens his mouth he’s only laughing. He thinks of all those empty houses, of all the children inside Bobby Singer’s home who will never see their parents again. Go big or go home, and this was only the start of it all. “You burn everything,” Victor says, “and then what – start over? Make it all better? _How?_ How is this God’s will?”

“To destroy the existence of evil?” Castiel asks. His voice is cold and hard and Victor takes a step back reflexively. “To eradicate our enemy and take away everything that is poisonous and ugly? You ask me to justify the means to end suffering and temptation?”

“Yeah,” Victor whispers, “I do. Justify this – ” He points up, to where Dean Winchester lies stinking and rotting in a small, dusty bedroom. “ – tell me how that’s his part to play in Armageddon, how his death or any of them is worth what your side is doing.”

Castiel is quiet for a long time. The wind lifts the trench coat, billows it out behind him. There’s thunder in the distance. Maybe Victor’s just called the wrath of God down upon himself. He squares his shoulders and waits for the angel to answer.

“I’ve been sent to raise Dean Winchester from Hell,” Castiel says unwillingly. “But not yet.”

Victor opens his mouth to reply, but Castiel’s eyes widen abruptly, one hand flying up to his throat. He coughs, deep and hard, and other hand comes up, palm out, like he’s holding something back. It’s Sam. Who’s standing on the porch, his own hand out and thumb and forefinger curled into a circle, his eyes dark and terrifying.

“Why not?” he asks softly. Castiel makes a quick gesture with his wrist, and Sam stumbles backwards, landing hard on the bottom step. With careful, economical motions, Castiel tugs on the front of his jacket, straightens his tie.

“Samuel Winchester,” he says. “I didn’t think we would meet so soon.”

“If you can bring him back, whatever the hell you are,” Sam says, ignoring him, “do it _now_.“

“Or what?” Castiel says, low. “Think carefully before you open your mouth.”

Sam lowers his chin mulishly. Before he can say anything, Victor speaks. “Sam,” he says, “Sam, he’s an angel.”

Sam’s eyes widen. His face opens, covered in naked wonder. He tries to speak and fails, beyond words. “Thank God,” he says and brings one shaky hand up to wipe his cheeks. “Thank God.”

“I wouldn’t,” Castiel says tonelessly.

Sam opens his eyes. “Aren’t you here to help us?”

Castiel hesitates. He stares down at his feet. He glances over at Victor. This close to the angel, Victor can see that his face isn’t blank, not exactly; the muscles are slack, like he doesn’t know quite to use them, wearing some poor bastard’s body the same way he’s wearing that cheap coat, the same way that the demons do. “We’re here to win the war,” Castiel says. “Your brother will play a large part in our fight. That’s why I’ve been sent, to raise him from perdition.”

“I don’t understand,” Sam says. He slides down off the porch and onto his knees. He opens his hands. “Please, you have to save him. God only know what they’re doing to him in Hell – ”

“God knows,” Castiel says. His voice is almost gentle. “I know, too. Everything that has happened to Dean is happening to me as well. He’s attracted the attention of a – very high ranking demon. A specialist. He’s put Dean on his rack, focused all of his energy into breaking your brother. At this moment, he’s infested Dean with thousands of tiny worms that are burrowing through his skin. When they break through the walls of his intestines, they will rupture outward in enormous, agonizing sores. There are seven in each of his eyeballs, twisted around the cornea. They will also pass out of his body sooner or later. When they do, Alastair will feed them to Dean and it will happen all over again.”

Victor’s stomach clenches, and he turns away, doubling over and breathing harshly through his nose until it passes. “ _No_ ,” Sam says. It’s more of a sob than a word. “No, you have to do something, you can’t let that happen.”

“It’s already happening,” Castiel tells him. “It’s happened every day for the last sixty nine weeks. Time passes differently in Hell, you know. For every day that goes by on Earth, months will pass. And each day, your brother endures tortures that are unlimited by human imagination and the physical reality that you know. And at the end of each day, this demon makes him an offer. To come down off the rack, if he will put someone else on it. Every day, Dean has said no. He has spit in Alastair’s face and paid dearly for it. So far he has resisted, but he will not be able to forever. And when Dean breaks – when he takes up the knife and spills blood of his own free will – that, and not before, is when I will be allowed to save your brother.”

“How can that be God’s will?” Victor asks again. “How can that be what God wants?”

“I’m told that it’s necessary,” Castiel says. “You act like God has never ordered cities to be destroyed, never punished the innocent to prove a point.”

“What _is_ the point, then?” Victor asks. “What’s the bigger fucking picture?”

Castiel is quiet for a long time. Victor can see Maria through the windows, sitting at the kitchen table for a meal with some of the others. He’s seeing a window to the moon. No one’s come looking for them, like they’ve ceased to exist for everyone inside. It’s getting colder – Victor wraps his arms around himself. Sam is shivering in his T-shirt, still on his knees on the cold ground. “Lilith is breaking the sixty six Seals,” he says, after a while. “Think of the Seals as locks on a door. The last one opens, and Lucifer walks free.”

“You’re here to stop her,” Sam says, and Castiel looks away.

“We’re here to win the war,” he says. “A righteous man who sheds blood in Hell – this is one of the Seals. As he breaks – so shall it break. This burden rests on Dean, who has sacrificed so much already. His fall will allow us to destroy Lilith and Lucifer himself. His suffering will help us win the war.” He moves towards Sam, who looks up at him with red, hopeless eyes. Castiel kneels before him in the trampled earth in front of Bobby’s porch.

Believe me, Sam,” he says quietly. “I would give – anything for it to be different.”

Sam turns away. “What do you care?” he accuses. “If you’re not willing to help him, what the fuck do you care, anyway? What have I been praying to all these years? Fuck you. If you’re not going to help us, then get the fuck out of here.”

“Dean is – ” Castiel starts, and then says nothing. He looks over his shoulder at Victor, who feels a twinge of surprise that the angel even remembers that anyone else is there. There’s something in Castiel’s eyes that takes Victor a long time to recognize. It’s buried deep in the slack face of his host, but there’s real emotion there. Real anguish. It’s hard to witness, and Victor looks away. When he looks back, the angel is gone.

 

 

The floor is hard under Victor’s shoulders. He’s got a spot on the rug and his jacket is balled up underneath his head, and all around him are sleeping bodies, snuffling, whistling, breathing bodies. Upstairs, he thinks that he can hear someone crying.

Sam Winchester is standing in the doorway. Victor can feel him there, feel Sam’s eyes on him. The floodlights are on in the yard and they throw Sam’s shadow against the wall. When Sam turns away, Victor pushes himself up and follows. Not like he was sleeping anyway.

He expects there to be another bottle in Sam’s hand, but either Bobby’s well has run dry or Sam has. The kitchen table creaks when Victor sits down, and he glances over his shoulder, checking to see if they’ve woken anyone up.

Sam is sprawled in his chair. It looks too small to hold him up. He stares at the ground and shakes his foot back and forth. He looks so fucking young and for a long, stricken moment Victor can’t remember how old Sam is, how many years it’s been since he was that kid at Stanford.

He’s spared of trying to figure out what to say when Sam looks up, focuses directly on Victor for what feels like the first time since Colorado.

“I want to burn him,” Sam says quietly, “so that no one can use him, no one can have him for their fucking war. But then I think about never being able to get him back, about him gone forever, and I just _can’t_ – ” He squeezes his eyes shut, pinching the bridge of his nose tightly.

Victor thinks about Nancy, poor sweet Nancy with her pretty face cut into strips and peeled right off her body. Of the hot slickness of the deputy’s insides, splashing on Victor’s shoes. He thinks about the way Lilith sliced the thin skin between his fingers and toes with the knife from Victor’s own pocket, digging the tip of the blade up underneath his nails. He tries to imagine taking that knife to Nancy, to Reidy. Tries to imagine living with himself afterwards.

“We’ll get him back,” Victor says steadily. Sam looks at him like Victor’s just thrown him a lifesaver. “We’ll do it on our terms. And then we’ll take the war directly to her own fucking doorstep. See what she thinks of that.”

“Not a lot,” comes a voice from the shadows. They both tense, Victor’s hand flying to his waistband. He curses; the gun is in the living room, underneath his jacket. When the girl steps out into the dim light, Victor feels just a sliver of pressure subside; it’s the demon.

“What are you doing here, Ruby?” Sam demands, his voice still pitched low. No sound from the other room yet. Ruby turns the third chair around, straddles it backwards. There’s a tension in her face that isn’t quite smothered by the sneer on her lips. She’s afraid, Victor thinks.

“Gee, Sam,” she says. “Thanks for the warm welcome back, I appreciate it.”

“Didn’t think you’d show your face around here again, that’s all,” Sam says. His whole body is coiled and ready, and Victor leans back instinctively.

“Couldn’t get near the place,” she says. “Not until your feathery friend left. And that’s why I’m here. They’re coming for you, Sam. That angel was the only thing standing in between you and a thousand demons who all want your guts for garters. It’d be a nice way to get established in the new world order Lilith’s got planned. Y’hear?”

“You knew about the angel?” Victor asks. She looks over at him, her head tilted, eyes narrowed.

“Not as much, no,” she says. “They’re not prone to popping over for a beer more than, oh, once a millennia or so. All I knew was, it was something big. Something I’d never seen before. That thing was enough to keep Lilith off your trail for a little while – even found the time to save _your_ ass from that demon at the motel, chuckles – but it’s apparently flown the coop. Guess where that leaves us?”

“Fort Knox,” Sam says, “Let them come.”

“No,” Victor says abruptly. “We can’t stay here.”

They both look at him. Victor gestures over his shoulder at the huddled masses. He can’t hear anyone crying anymore. The house is quiet and still. “You want to risk their lives? We brought these people here so they would be safe, _protected_. The last thing we oughta be doing is bringing demons down on their heads. We can’t. Stay. Here.”

Sam blinks at him, looks over to the living room like it’s the first time he’s seen it, like he’d forgotten it was full of people. They’d rearranged the whole place to fit everyone; more showed up after dinner. They’re all people that Dean and Sam saved over the years, a catalogue of every life they changed. The stacks of books are repositioned anywhere they won’t fall on someone’s head. The whole house reeks of the musty blankets Bobby brought up from his basement so that there’d be enough to go around. They’ve circled the wagons. “Where can we go?”

“Where’s Lilith?” Victor asks Ruby.

She hesitates before answering, her eyes darting at Sam like she wants permission. He’s looking at Victor, eyes clear and determined. “In the west,” she says. “Near Vegas.”

“Of course,” Victor says, rolling his eyes. “Go big or go home. That’s where, then. That’s where we gotta go.”

“You won’t get a hundred miles,” Ruby hisses, and Victor shrugs.

“Better than the alternative.” He looks at Sam, who smiles, unexpectedly.

“I feel like the Sundance Kid,” he says, and Victor laughs. It feels good, eases something deep inside of his heart. He wishes that Reidy were here to see this, Winchesters and demons and angels and fucking _everything_. He bet Cal would’ve loved it.

He wakes Bobby up while Sam gets the car ready. Bobby’s eyes open when Victor crouches next to him, like he’s just been waiting for Victor to get there. There are five children sleeping in Bobby’s bed and the old man’s wrapped up in a carpet on the floor, between them and the world.

Victor tells him of the angel in a hushed whisper. Sixty-six Seals and sixty-nine weeks. Bobby watches Victor’s face with bright eyes, and at the end of it Victor tells him not to burn Dean’s body. Bobby just shakes his head, passes a trembling hand over his beard. The door at the other end of the hallway is closed but there’s the faintest hint of sour in the air.

Sam is waiting by the car. His duffle’s in the backseat. Victor slings his through the window. “You ready?” he asks Sam.

“This is suicide,” Ruby says sourly. She’s leaning against the front porch, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. “You seriously think this big damn hero stuff is going to do any good? If you die, you throw away our best chance at beating Lilith. If you guys think this is bad, just wait until she _really_ gets going –”

“No,” Sam says, and she stops dead, her hand flying up to her throat. “I don’t believe you.”

Her eyes flicker and turn black, and she coughs deeply. A trickle of smoke falls out of her mouth and slides down her chin before dissolving into the air. Victor is suddenly, distinctly afraid. “Sam,” he says at the same time that Ruby does.

“Sam, don’t do this,” she says, “I can help, I can –”

“You said you would help me save him,” Sam says. “But you want to use me too, just as much as the angels want my brother. I should kill you. I can do that now.”

“Sam,” Victor says softly. He puts a hand on Sam’s arm. The muscle is tense underneath his hand and then, abruptly, Sam relaxes.

“I’m not what you think I am,” he says, and Ruby sags abruptly, gasping for air.

Sam turns away, and like that, the fear is gone from Victor’s heart. He looks at Victor and Victor holds his gaze. It feels important not to look away, not to give; he can do this for Sam, hold him up until they can get Dean back, until they find Lilith and make her pay.

“Come on,” he says. “We’ve got work to do.”

  



	6. Chapter 6

  


Ruby’s wrong. In the end, they make it three hundred miles.

The Chevy’s as much of a beast to drive as he thought she’d be, the engine a dull roar that takes muscle to bring to life, the wheel stiff and uncooperative in his hands like she knows Victor’s got no business driving her. She smells like Dean, like old leather and gasoline, and it’s for a while it’s hard to breathe past the ache in his chest. He looks over at Sam, boneless in the passenger seat. It’s on the tip of his tongue to ask about the things Sam can do, why the demon wanted him. Whether Sam really could have saved Dean somehow.

He turns back to the road. The world around them looks like the surface of the moon, covered in minerals and ash. There’s a light rain of it drifting down on them like snow, bright in the Chevy’s headlights. The quiet is oppressive, unnatural. His fingers itch towards the radio. AC/DC would be a fitting soundtrack to the end of the world, but he can’t make himself push the tape in.

The road is open in front of them, the headlights penetrating only a little better than the days when the whole world went black. It gets to him, digging gnawing teeth into the back of his neck as the adrenaline fades, as his brain tries to slot things together enough that they make sense again. He looks over at Sam. Wants to reassure him. Wants to be reassured.

The sky’s creaking closer to dawn and his eyes feel gritty and red. He can see clouds at the edge of the horizon and he squints at them, his eyes flickering back and forth between the road. They’re moving quickly.

Something hits the windshield with a dull crack and both of them flinch, Sam jerking upright like he’d fallen asleep. “What the fuck what was that?” he asks.

There’s a smear of red on the windshield and for a bright, painful second Victor’s eyes cut helplessly away from it. He makes himself look; one long wing survives, impossibly delicate. It twitches in the wind and slides upwards on the glass. A second one hits and this time Victor sees what it is before it explodes across the windshield. A third locust snags on the wipers and breaks clean in half on the blade. The sun’s risen high enough now that he can’t fool himself about the clouds. It’s not the weather that’s on their tail.

The locusts get thicker in the air. Sam and Victor draw closer together instinctively. The sound of them is loud enough that Victor thinks they’re already in the car, crawling through the pipes, tickling down the back of his neck. There are noises under the hood; the locusts are being sucked through the fan. The rancid smell of them cooking on the hot engine fills the car and memory hits Victor like an assault: stepping on grasshoppers in the field behind the house, Anthony egging him on, jumping through the tall grass.

The left headlight breaks and then the right, one right after another like they planned it, and Victor hits the breaks hard enough to throw them both forward. As soon as the car slows they’re on it, clustering around the windows, the sides, scrambling under the belly of the car, looking for ways in. The cab gets dark as they slowly block the light out.

“Jesus,” Sam whispers. He’s got a knife in his hand like that’ll do something.

Victor goes for the door handle and Sam grabs his shoulder. “What are we supposed to do?” he hisses. “They’re gonna get in sooner or later.”

“Something’s coming,” Sam says, and Victor’s hand clenches around Sam’s collar.

“What is it?” he asks, and Sam shakes his head, his eyes wide.

When he feels air blow cool against the back of his neck all he can think about is the locusts, they’ve slid their way inside the car somehow and they’ll be peeling it apart, but suddenly it’s quiet, so fucking quiet that he shakes his head. Hits it with the butt of his palm before he realizes that there’s nothing wrong with his ears. He can see the locusts all around them through what little light they have left, long legs shivering over the glass, but he can’t hear them anymore.

Sam turns first. The knife still in his hand, like it’ll do anything. The angel is in the back seat, his head bowed over folded hands. “You don’t understand,” he says. “There’s nothing I can do. They’d hunt us all down - every one of us. They’d burn that house down with Dean’s body inside of it.” He turns his hands over, staring at the palms. “It would be just as easy to raise him from the ashes as from a stinking, rotted piece of meat.” The light flickers over his lowered face.

“Castiel,” Sam says, and the angel looks up. His eyes would be wild if there was any recognizable emotion in them, any sign or expression that a human being was looking out of them.

“The righteous man who begins it,” he says, his voice grating over every word, “is the only one who can finish it. I have watched over your brother for a very long time, Sam. You know as well as I do the courage that Dean possesses. His sacrifice is meant to be, and his reward will be greater than you can imagine. God is not cruel. He’s chosen Dean because He knows what each of us are capable of. It’s _fate_. There’s nothing that I can do.”

Something’s coming, oppressive like summer heat. Victor can feel it in the uneasy slide of horror down his spine. He can’t breathe. He can almost imagine the locusts forming, swarming around some sort of grotesque shape, the outline of fingers rubbing against the glass. Begging to be let in. Castiel glances up at the locusts like he hadn’t noticed they were there. The look on his face is something like recognition. It’s on the tip of Victor’s tongue to tell him that none of that fucking matters, if he can’t help them than he’s not any more welcome here than in Bobby’s yard, they’ve got more important shit to deal with right now. But what he says is, “I don’t believe you.”

They both stare at him. Castiel looks like Victor’s slapped something precious right out of him. His mouth is slack. “You wanna tell yourself that you don’t have a choice,” Victor says, “You go right on ahead. But it’s not true and it’s still not right and you know that Dean would never want this, no matter how good it turned for him or anyone else in the end.”

Castiel flinches and Sam leans forward, moving into the angel’s space. “Why did you come here?” he asks, voice low. “Why’d you come back?”

Castiel shakes his head. His mouth shapes the words like he’s still getting the hang of using it, of breathing and talking and wearing a body. He shakes his head again, harder this time, his eyes sweeping down and away from them. He reaches two fingers towards the window almost absently and locusts fall away from it. Victor can hear them hit the ground.

“Because,” Castiel says. “Because I don’t believe that this is the will of Heaven, and I don’t know what else to do.”

“Save Dean,” Sam says.

“Help us stop this before it gets any worse,” Victor says.

Castiel is silent for a long time. Victor’s hand clenches around the door handle. They won’t get very far on their own but he’ll be damned if he’ll die like this.

“I have been away from home,” Castiel says, “for a very, very long time.” He glances up at them and nods once, almost imperceptibly. And then he’s gone, and there’s sunlight streaming in through the car windows. Sam and Victor look at each other, saying nothing.

The Chevy leaves black marks on the highway when Victor flips the car back around and points her towards home.

 

-

 

Bobby’s house is quiet when they peel into the front yard, the brakes shrieking in protest. The car doors slam closed and the sound fades away. They can hear voices coming from the other side of the house. They don’t speak; they haven’t spoken since the angel disappeared, haven’t said anything past that long glance in the front seat, hardly daring to hope. The sun beats down on the backs of their necks and the thought of saying anything now is terrifying. Like looking over your shoulder when you’re almost out of the underworld.

They circle the house. There are refugees in the back field and Bobby Singer sitting on the porch, a glass held loosely in his hand. He looks at them for a long second and then holds a hand up to shield his eyes from the sun, like he’s not quite sure what he’s seeing.

Victor sees Bobby open his mouth, breathe their names. Then Sam catches him up with those long arms and holds him tight, his voice urgent, loud enough for Victor to hear, “Where’s Dean? Has anything happened?”

Bobby pulls back from Sam and shakes his head, clearly bewildered. He reaches a hand to Sam’s shoulder, places the other on Victor’s. “You,” he says, “I didn’t think I’d see you boys again.”

“Where’s Dean?” Sam asks, and moves towards the house, but Bobby’s grip only tightens, pulling the material of Sam’s shirt tight.

“He ain’t there,” Bobby says. He looks Sam full in the face when he says it and some distant part of Victor’s brain admires that even as he knows what’s coming, what Bobby’s going to say next. He saw it in Bobby’s face – fuck, it was only last night, feels like years have passed – when he said they were leaving. That they were going to take Lilith down. “I buried him this morning. Didn’t – didn’t think you’d be coming back.”

Sam’s hands shake where they’re resting on Bobby’s shoulders. “Bobby,” he says, and Bobby cuts him off. “I said not – ”

“You said a lot of things, Sam Winchester, and you don’t want to ask me how many made sense and how many were plain nonsense. If you’ve come back for Dean, you’ll find him over yonder. Buried him next to my wife. I didn’t burn him, but that’s all I –”

That’s as far as he gets before Sam takes off running. Bobby stares at Victor, agape. “But I don’t –”

“Grab some shovels,” Victor says, and follows Sam.

The graveyard is through the copse of trees, down the creek that runs opposite the Salvage Yard, bracketing Bobby Singer’s property. He can see the tan of Sam’s jacket through the trees. Sam runs heavy and loud, crashing through the woods, not caring. He runs like he knows where he’s going. It’s far enough to run to, far enough that when he bursts onto the high ground and see what happened to the trees, he barely even thinks about why no one heard them fall.

Castiel is kneeling next to a fresh grave, his hands folded and his head bowed. He doesn’t look like he’s praying Dean back to life; he looks like all the air got sucked out of that body he’s wearing, his face so bleak that for a moment, all Victor can think is, he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t get Dean back.

Then Sam hits the ground so hard he skids a little, screaming over his shoulder for Victor to _help him, can’t you feel it_. And as Victor takes a faltering step forward, he does. Something cracking wide open underneath his feet. He stumbles trying to get to Sam’s side quick enough. They push their hands up to the elbows into the soft dirt, still loose from the burial, still wet from the morning fog, Castiel a statue across from them, for all he helps or all they even see him because there, warm, gritty with dirt, swimming slowly towards them, they grab Dean’s hands.

Sam lets out a sobbing breath and pulls so hard Victor’s sure he’ll dislocate Dean’s shoulder. Victor’s belly down in the dirt to get down deep enough to slide one arm under Dean’s, his other hand fisted in Dean’s t-shirt. His fingers stretch towards air. His face is smeared and dirty and Sam lets go of his brother long enough to swipe shaking hands across his eyes and mouth. It takes both of them to pull him out, bent sharp at the waist, Victor’s hand up under Dean’s knees. He kicks himself free and for a long moment they just lie there, Dean half on top of Sam, Victor half on top of him, his face pressed into the dusty skin on the back of Dean’s neck. He can’t make himself let go.

 

-

 

Dean is quiet and skittish as they bring him back to the house. He stumbles twice and eventually Sam gets under one arm and Bobby gets the other. Bobby’s still weeping quietly; Victor can barely see it on his face but he swipes at his face with his free hand as they walk, and he’s barely let go of Dean since he hauled them all upright off the ground and pulled Dean into a hug as fierce as the one Sam gave him.

The angel follows at what Victor suspects is a polite distance. Sam ignores him completely. Bobby shot a questioning glance at Victor, but otherwise hasn’t asked.

Victor wants to say thank you. He thinks Castiel might already know, might feel just as scraped open and raw as the rest of them, if angels feel the same sort of things that humans feel. Victor’s starting to think that maybe they do; Castiel’s eyes haven’t left Dean yet.

The house is blessedly quiet when they struggle up the back porch and up the stairs. Sam detaches from the group and takes Dean into the bathroom by himself. Victor lingers in the hallway. The door is still halfway open and he can see Sam’s careful motions. Settling Dean carefully on the toilet. Turning on the water, checking the temperature on the palm of his hand. Kneeling in front of his brother, voice pitched too low to hear, Dean staring down at him like a man dying of thirst. Victor can’t look away. Can barely make himself breathe.

When he finally, finally tears himself away, Bobby’s eyes are full of tears, and the angel is gone. Victor reaches out, takes Bobby gently by the elbow. “Come on,” he says softly. “I know I need a drink.”

Bobby shakes his head, unblinking, even as he turns towards where Victor’s guiding him. “He’ll be there when you come back,” Victor says, and hopes it’s true.

 

-

 

A long time later. The sun lingers on the horizon. There’s a garden out back and Victor lingers on the dry beds, hope a physical thing in his chest. He imagines tomatoes, big summer vegetables, something living and still warm from the sun. It feels possible even though a few weeks ago there was frost on the ground and he’s sure that Bobby hasn’t been out here for a while. Bigger things to worry about than a few plants.

All he finds are withered leaves and one enormous zucchini plant, thriving beyond all reason. He stays outside anyway, squinting in the last bit of sunlight. He’s not sure what he’s waiting for, angels or gods or Winchesters. Either way, it gets cold and someone hollers that dinner is served, and the house is warm and welcoming enough that he bites the bullet and goes upstairs.

Sam is asleep, his legs halfway off the bed, his whole body curled towards his brother. Bobby’s in the rocking chair, his chin dipping into his chest, the glass still half full at his elbow. Didn’t need the drink after all, Victor thinks. Dean is sitting cross-legged on the bed, scrubbed clean and dressed in a pair of old sweatpants. His hair stands up like he stuck his finger in a light socket, and he’s got one hand wrapped around the back of Sam’s head. Just holding on. The other hand held loose in his lap. He smiles when he sees Victor.

Victor sits at the head of the bed, shifting the pillow back to make room for himself. Dean watches Victor settle, something indefinable in his eyes. He looks different. Which only makes sense. Victor wants to pull the hem of his shirt up, see what kind of marks Hell left on Dean. “You, you, uh,” Victor says hesitantly, and Dean’s eyes crinkle at the corners.

“Sam told me about,” Dean says, leaving the sentence hanging between them, all those miles of dark road and blood. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to, like that.”

“Yeah,” Victor says. “Would’ve appreciated a warning.” He doesn’t even know why he says it. It doesn’t matter now, never did. Dean grins, but it doesn’t stay on his face very long. He looks down at Sam. Sam’s fingers are wrapped around Dean’s bare ankle. Tightly, even though his face is relaxed in sleep, all that worry smoothed out and gone. The look on Dean’s face is peaceful. It’s uncomfortable to see it, like Victor shouldn’t be seeing something so intimate.

“I didn't ask for it,” Dean says softly. “I just didn't have anything else, besides Sam. I never regretted it. Not even once. It was - I was -"

"I know," Victor says and Dean shakes his head.

"You can't know," he says, his voice scraped raw. He pushes the hair back from Sam's face, the look on his face sheepish. "I mean -"

"It's okay," Victor offers. "Are you, um. Are you hurt?”

“Nah,” Dean says, and clears his throat. It sounds like it hurts him to talk. “Not a mark on me. Just this.”

Victor sucks in a breath when Dean pulls up his sleeve. The mark is raised, peeling flesh, shiny and red against the paler skin of Dean’s bicep. Victor’s hand hovers uncertainly over it, not even all that close. He’s afraid to touch Dean, some part of his brain remembering cold flesh that he never even went near. He makes himself reach those last few inches and Dean’s unmarked skin is as warm as he ever was, as warm as driving in the Chevy, Victor’s knuckles brushing Dean’s arm as he reaches for the radio, never on accident.

The handprint on Dean’s arm is cool against Victor’s palm. He’s not expecting the temperature difference and he flinches a little. “Yeah,” Dean says. “I know.”

He stays still as Victor traces two fingers across the surface of the scar. “I,” Dean says, after a long time. “I remember him too. He came for me. It was like, um. It was like staring at a comet up close. At that point I could hardly remember anything except for Alastair, the demon who – who was there too. Just him and all of the stink around us. Then …” Dean trails off. He looks down at his own hand, turning it over, palm upwards.

“He saved you,” Victor finishes softly.

“Yeah. I think he did." Dean looks up at Victor, and then glances down towards his brother. "But what if he was wrong?" he asks rapidly, like he's afraid of the words coming out. "What if I could've saved everyone? What if I could've won the war for them?"

Victor is silent for a long time, holding Dean's gaze. "If you'd stayed, you mean? You think that would've been a good trade? They never even noticed us dying, Dean. They just wanted to win."

He wants to tell Dean that there are a lot of good reasons to die. A lot of good reasons to suffer. He wishes he could know for sure, whether the angels would have turned the world into a paradise or if they would have scorched it clean. He'd ask Coyote if he could, but he's done getting on his knees and praying to something he doesn't really think will answer. It's down to them now. An old man, an angel and a pair of brothers worn thin as an old pair of jeans. And him. Victor can't help but grin, staring down at his own hands. It really is kinda funny.

“I, I think I –," Dean says, hesitantly. "Where is he? Did he – ?”  
  
“No idea,” Victor says. “I turned around and he was gone. Seems prone to it. Bet he’d come if you called, though,” and Dean smiles, the motion of it flickering over his face. Something grateful in his eyes.

Silence stretches between them, and Victor says, “Go. I’ll watch over them.” Dean nods. He reaches towards Victor, and some traitorous part of Victor’s brain expects Dean to kiss him. Instead his hand slips around Victor’s bicep, holding on, and he leans forward until his forehead rests against Victor’s shoulder. Victor turns his face towards Dean, breathes in the smell of Bobby’s cheap shampoo, the warmth of Dean’s skin. His heart feels full enough to burst.

Dean doesn’t close the door behind himself, but it’s still at least a little bit like the last time he left Victor.

Victor’s been in Wonderland for a long time now, what feels like years and years of the world not making sense. He remembers poring over pathology reports, cold case files, autopsy notes, a thousand gleaming nonsenses that only ever added up right when he put in his own formula of logic, switched a few of the numbers around, ignored a few more. It still doesn’t make sense, how a man can sell his soul and rise five days later (a small part of Victor’s brain that makes him think he might just be getting used to this says, well, the Beatles never beat out Jesus either), pulled out of the Pit by an honest to something angel. And here, next to him, more proof he never needed of what else was out there. Without Dean, Sam curls further in on himself, his hands pressing together under his chin. Victor still has no idea what they want Sam for. If it’s as bad as what Heaven had in mind for Dean.

  



End file.
